What If AI Isn't a Bubble?
The hype debate is comfortable. As long as the question stays open, none of us has to change anything.
Summer does something to the mind. The pace drops, the calendar thins out and suddenly there’s room for the big questions. One of them has kept coming back to me all summer.
What if all of it is true?
Not as a prediction. I’m not saying it is. This is a thought experiment, nothing more. But stay with me for a moment.
What if what’s happening with AI right now isn’t a bubble. What if it isn’t another wave of technology that washes over us and leaves everything roughly as it was. What if it’s real.
What if agents become a natural part of the workforce. Not tools we open when we need them, but colleagues that take on tasks, own processes and deliver while we sleep.
What if our organizations employ fewer people a few years from now. Not because the business is shrinking, but because it’s growing with a workforce that’s largely not human.
What if AI turns out to be a better boss than a human. Fairer feedback, no favoritism, always available, never tired, never in a bad mood. What does that do to our idea of leadership?
What if this is one of those shifts that history later divides into before and after.
What if work as we know it changes at its core. Not in twenty years. Now, while we’re busy debating whether it’s hype.
Because that’s where I get stuck. We spend enormous energy debating whether this is a bubble. Overrated or underrated. Hype or substance. It’s a comfortable debate, because as long as the question stays open, none of us has to change anything.
But playing with the thought costs nothing. So play along.
If you knew it was true. That agents become colleagues, that organizations get rebuilt, that work gets redefined. Would you act the way you do today?
Would you prioritize the same things at work? Would your own development look the way it does? Would your organization keep moving in the same direction, at the same pace?
Or would you choose to do something else?
The honest answer to that question is the interesting part. Because if the answer is that you’d do something else, that says something about today. It means you’re waiting for a certainty that will never arrive. No one sends a message the day the hype officially becomes reality.
I’m not saying it’s true. I’m only saying, what if.
These are the thoughts I’ve been carrying this summer.
What if it’s true?