Artificial intelligence is either a set of technologies that is really banal and ordinary staplers or photocopiers or even laser printers.

Or it is a general purpose technology, in which case it's going to have that kind of large-scale systemic effect, not just within firms, but also across industries and within the economy at large.

And the reason I set that up is because there's a big debate about where is the ROI and what should

the ROI look like. If AI is a really trivial, ordinary, ordinary non-general pubs technology,

you would expect there to be ROI quite quickly.

You just don't need to do that much. If it is a general purpose technology, we would expect it to

take a little bit of time to really start to show it's metal. I mean, that's what history tells us.

It is the J-curve that Eric Briniofsson talks about.

It's what Paul David famously described when he looked at electricity and we drill into electricity

quite a lot in our analysis. And the reason is that in order to absorb all the things that a general

purpose technology can do,

you have to change a lot in your business.

Today, I want to talk about AI and why companies are seeing the return and investments they are. It is based on

the essay and analysis that Nathan and I put out early this week to try to make sense of what we

are really seeing. And I thought the story of electricity was really amazing. And I just,

I think it's the best

thing we have right now. The first companies to use electricity in the 1890s used it to

illuminate the workplace, right? They just added more and more light bulbs to extend the working day.

And famously, we talk about Serrano, who's an Italian coachmaker. He ends up making the first

automobile for what became Fiat. And he used electricity very early on, actually 15 years before

Henry Ford got started with light bulbs. And in many ways, where we are today with AI is in the

light bulb stage. That is the co-pilot or the chatbot. But what actually happened in

...