As a person who studies business acumen for a living and has been doing so for more than 50 years, I
Turn on the news, listen to a podcast, or spend ten minutes scrolling through your social media streams, and you might reach a different conclusion. Apparently, artificial general intelligence is coming, superintelligence is right behind it, millions of jobs are going to disappear, humans will become obsolete, and the machines will take over sometime around a week from next Thursday.
Maybe.
But I have a slightly more cynical, and much more boring, business acumen perspective.
Eventually, somebody has to pay for all of this. And that is where things get interesting.
A Little History Lesson
Over the past 150 years, we have seen versions of this movie before.
Banking became enormously powerful and complicated. Pharmaceuticals experienced explosive innovation and investment. Agriculture industrialized. Telecommunications transformed the world. The internet created entirely new industries. Software changed virtually every business process. Cryptocurrency arrived promising to reinvent money itself.
The technologies were different, but the business cycle often had some familiar characteristics.
An exciting new opportunity emerges. Capital pours in. Companies race to establish leadership. Investors reward growth. Competitors spend aggressively because nobody wants to be left behind. Infrastructure gets built. Talent becomes incredibly expensive. Expectations become enormous.
For a while, almost nobody wants to be the person in the room asking the boring questions.
How much is this costing us? Where is the return? When will this investment generate positive cash flow? What happens if demand doesn't grow as quickly as projected? What are the risks?
And perhaps the most important business acumen question of all: Is the next dollar we invest going to create more value than the last dollar we invested?
Eventually, somebody starts asking those questions.
Sometimes it is the CFO. Sometimes it is the Board of Directors. Sometimes it is investors. Sometimes customers push back. And sometimes governments step in because the industry has become too important, too concentrated, too risky, or too disruptive to operate without additional oversight.
AI isn't magically exempt from these forces.
AI Still Has a P&L
This is the part of the AI takeover story that I find fascinating.
AI may feel like magic when you type a prompt into a little box and receive an extraordinary answer three seconds later, but somewhere behind that box is a very real business.
There are data centers. Chips. Electricity. Cooling. Software development. Cybersecurity. Engineers. Researchers. Infrastructure. Capital expenditures. Maintenance. Compliance. And an increasingly expensive race to develop the next generation of models.
Those expenses eventually have to produce economic value. That's Business Acumen 101.
Companies can invest ahead of revenue for a long time. Investors can tolerate losses when they believe enormous future returns are coming. Businesses can subsidize products to build market share.
But eventually, economics shows up. And when it does, leaders start making trade-offs.
That is why I don't believe the most likely future of AI is unlimited, uncontrolled expansion until some supercomputer decides humans are an unnecessary operating expense.
I think something much more familiar is likely to happen.AI will become a business.
A gigantic business. A transformative business. Perhaps one of the most important businesses in human history.
But still a business.
What We Can Learn From History
History suggests that transformative technologies don't simply grow forever without constraints. They mature.
Competition changes. Capital becomes more disciplined. Customers become more sophisticated. Regulators get involved. Standards emerge. Margins matter. Inefficient competitors disappear. The surviving companies figure out where the technology actually creates value instead of simply attaching it to everything because investors like hearing the letters "AI."
And that last part may be closer than we think. We are already moving beyond the stage where saying, "We have an AI strategy," is particularly impressive.
The next questions are harder:
Those are not technology questions. They are business acumen questions.
The Most Likely Scenario for AI
My guess is that AI doesn't replace humanity. It becomes embedded into humanity's work.
The calculator didn't eliminate finance. Excel didn't eliminate accountants. The internet didn't eliminate salespeople. Google didn't eliminate the need to know things. Each changed what people needed to be good at.
AI is going to do the same thing, only much faster and probably much more dramatically.
That is already changing how we think about learning at Advantexe.
In our business simulations, we encourage participants to use AI to analyze market information, interpret financial statements, challenge assumptions, evaluate competitors, prepare presentations, and think through difficult decisions.
Why wouldn't we? That's increasingly how they are going to work.But we don't want the AI to make the decision for them.
The learning happens when people combine the power of AI with judgment, experience, collaboration, leadership, and business acumen.
A simulation team can ask an AI agent to analyze its P&L. The AI can identify declining margins, rising costs, excess inventory, or weak cash flow in seconds.
Great. Now what?
Should the team raise prices and potentially lose volume? Cut costs and potentially hurt capabilities? Reduce inventory and potentially jeopardize service? Invest in innovation and sacrifice short-term earnings? Borrow money? Delay capital expenditures? Enter a new market?
AI can help illuminate those choices. Human beings still have to make them. And, perhaps more importantly, human beings have to live with the consequences.
That is precisely why simulations are becoming even more valuable in an AI-enabled world. Learners can practice using AI as a business tool while developing the very capabilities AI makes more important: judgment, critical thinking, financial literacy, strategic thinking, communication, collaboration, and decision-making under uncertainty.
Don't Worry. AI Is Going to Be Great.
I am incredibly bullish on AI.
I think it will improve healthcare, accelerate scientific discovery, increase productivity, personalize education, eliminate mind-numbing work, help people make better decisions, and create products and services we can't imagine today.
It is going to change jobs. It will eliminate some jobs and create others. It will disrupt companies and probably entire industries. There will undoubtedly be mistakes, excesses, bad investments, ethical challenges, regulatory battles, and some spectacular examples of companies spending billions of dollars chasing ideas that never produce a return.
In other words, it will behave a lot like every other major business transformation humans have ever created. So, am I worried that AI will take over the world?
Not particularly.
I'm much more interested in whether companies will develop leaders who understand how to use it responsibly, productively, and economically.
Because no matter how intelligent artificial intelligence becomes, there is one force it may never completely escape:
Eventually, somebody is going to ask to see the P&L.