Unlock the economics of artificial intelligence with our expert blog series. Explore how AI delivers return on investment, boosts project effectiveness, and transforms industries. Dive into the macroeconomic effects of AI, from productivity gains and wage premiums to automation’s impact on jobs and skills. Get critical insights into regional differences, workforce trends, and the evolving global economic landscape powered by AI innovation.
Has the productivity impact of AI gone missing in action? We are now well over three years on from the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, since when there has been huge investment in AI across the global economy. No less than 61% of all venture capital ($259 billion) went into AI companies in 2025,…
How would you react if your AI costs went up an order of magnitude next month? AI promises productivity improvements in areas such as software code generation, but at what economic cost? Software budgets in large enterprises have traditionally been heavily skewed towards support and maintenance, with 60% or more of software budgets allocated to…
Despite huge investment, turning AI hype into sustainable profit is proving far harder than expected. Vast amounts of venture capital have gone into AI companies, or at least into companies that claim to be AI companies in their pitch decks. In 2025 no less than $192 billion was invested in AI startups, 61% of the…
We are living through an AI paradox. Three years on and hundreds of billions of dollars into the AI boom, the impact on productivity is, according to Goldman Sachs, ‘near zero.’ Yet corporate and VC investment in AI has never been higher. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and generative AI has become a buzzword.…
The technology media tends to focus on the latest foundation models for AI, products like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek etc. These are general-purpose models that can be adapted to specialist uses. What gets less attention in the press is that a whole industry of such specialist tools has sprung up to take advantage of the…
The growth of interest in AI has been a global phenomenon over the last three years. However, while large language model (LLM) adoption has been rapid, there is an open question as to whether the industry’s pricing model is sustainable. Is current LLM pricing a steady state business model or a temporary subsidy? Consider the…
Most articles about artificial intelligence (AI) today discuss its capabilities and potential for innovative applications, from chatbots to predictive maintenance in engineering. What is less well explored is the cost of delivering these projects, and even less well addressed is the issue of supporting an AI model once it is already in production use. We…
The current boom in AI has been sold to businesses as a great productivity improvement opportunity, at least by the AI vendors and the industry of consultants being paid to help with AI projects. There has been rapid adoption of the technology, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT having 800 million active weekly users, and 78% of companies…
Will AI replace your job? The fear of technology replacing jobs is not new. William Lee patented the mechanised loom for stocking production in the 16th century. In early 19th-century England, a group of textile workers, the Luddites, rioted and destroyed machinery that was automating the production of textiles, threatening their livelihoods. Often, technological advances…
It is now almost three years since ChatGPT was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Two months later, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest adopted consumer application in history. A torrent of money was thrown at AI, from venture capital firms backing AI start-ups (a third of all venture capital went into AI…