How Markets Mature

A year ago, the consensus on enterprise AI was tidy, confident…and wrong. It ran roughly like this:

Jobaggedon: AI would eat knowledge work, starting with the very software developers who built it.
SaaSpocalypse: It would gut the SaaS sector, as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday would be swallowed by frontier models.
Services in sunset: Consulting and tech-services firms had their best days behind them.
OpenAI, forever: A permanent, unassailable lead.

Here's the thing about a premature consensus: the market rarely reads the memo. SInce last summer:

Employment has held overall. And for devs? Employment and comp are both up.
SaaS valuations have climbed roughly 25% since June 1 and are back to 2024 levels.
Professional services? Far from killing them, the frontier labs are pouring money into the space. Turns out intelligence is cheap; the plumbing is not.
Anthropic passed OpenAI in both revenue and value, and will likely IPO first.

We've seen this movie before. During "the time of the great happiness" (the dotcom era), we were told everything would transform. Some things did: Amazon, Netflix, social media, remote working. Plenty didn’t: grocery stores and car dealerships are pretty much the same.

So it goes again. The Internet became a new transport layer for bits. Similarly, and far more importantly, AI is becoming an intelligence utility for all. Like electricity.

And here's the part worth dwelling on: the real winners of electrification weren't the utilities. The ultimate winners were those who bent the current into the assembly line, and from there into ten thousand inventions nobody had yet thought to want.

That's the moment we're in. AI is the new electricity. The winners won't be the ones who have the current, for everyone will. They'll be the ones who bend it into new forms of work, new products, new services. The gap from model to market is enormous, and it's where all the value (and related human ingenuity) is going to pool.

What a difference a year makes.

The week's most important AI news, curated for you:

Enterprise AI Adoption & Productivity

Well it's about time - McKinsey report says AI is “on the road to ROI” at last

Enterprise confidence in AI agents grows as productivity pays off, but rising token costs and budget pressures remain key hurdles to clear.

AI is putting pressure on the corporate IT budget

As AI expenses surge and cloud bills mount, enterprise CIOs are forced to pull funding from traditional software to keep up.

Cisco gave all 90,000 employees their own AI agent

The tech company granted access to a personal agent for all global employees this week.

Glean bets everything on context

Once known for enterprise search, the company is now arguing that context is what separates AI that works from AI that burns money.

AI Economics & The Technology Market

Bain announces partnership with Anthropic to accelerate clients’ enterprise AI transformations

Partnership combines Anthropic’s Claude models with Bain’s deep industry and transformation expertise to accelerate enterprise AI deployment at scale, building on Bain’s enterprise-wide rollout of Claude.

Is SaaS dead?

As Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast.” Inside the sector’s “epic” rally that could last through October.

Salesforce just put its entire CRM inside Claude, and says you’ll never need its app again

Through the new "Claudeforce" partnership, the SaaS giant embraces its own disintermediation, shifting from a seat-based UI model to an AI-driven consumption play.

Solution of the Week

RFP & Proposal Response Automation

RFP & Proposal Response Automation matches incoming questions against your library of past responses, capabilities, and case studies — producing a consistent, high-quality first response in hours instead of days.

Talent & The Changing Nature of Work

AI transformation requires redesigning work, not cutting roles

Premature AI layoffs are backfiring. Companies must move past "AI-washing" restructures and focus on integrating technology alongside human expertise.

To cram more AI skills onto LinkedIn profiles, more job seekers are turning to “time travel,” say researchers

Desperate to match recruiter demands, job seekers are going back years in their LinkedIn histories to add AI buzzwords to pre-generative-AI roles.

Shrewd IT hiring strategies have never been more critical

With major shortages in AI, data science, and cybersecurity skills, IT leaders need to hire fast, build talent from within, and identify needs years in advance — or pay the price.

AI Governance, Trust & Society

10 AI lessons from driving 200+ million fully autonomous miles

From sensor fusion to safety governance, Waymo shares the core principles forged over 200 million driverless miles—and why driver-assist systems are a false summit.

Another week, another tech CEO manifesto

Bill Gates goes negative in his 5,800 word essay, issuing a stark warning on AI and American jobs.

Stanley Druckenmiller makes AI writing a billionaire flex

The legendary investor says “of course” he used AI to write his WSJ op-ed, arguing that while ideas need to come from a writer, the actual sentences do not.

Why European innovation lags behind the U.S.

“I think Europe is clearly lost [in the] technological world. They don’t see the priority, they don’t see how fast this is going, and they think it’s something that’s optional.”

AI is having a “bonkers,” complicated impact on SF, city experts say

San Francisco’s chief economist says AI hasn’t juiced job growth yet, but it is driving up rents and office demand.

And one more thing…

The humanoids at China’s Robot Games were faster than Usain Bolt—but I'm more impressed by their tweezer mastery

Beijing’s endlessly delightful Robot Games featured tons of impressive stunts. But the most mind-blowing tricks challenged the humanoid’s brain, not its brawn.

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