By Jim Halcomb, Chief Research & Development Officer, EDM Association
Published on TDAN.com
Artificial intelligence has entered a phase that feels both inevitable and strangely precarious. The hype is unmistakable. So is the sense that we are still early — too early — for the broader economic transformation enthusiasts promise. If history is a guide, the current wave of investment and experimentation may look like a bubble that will eventually burst. But if the dot-com era taught us anything, it’s that bubbles clarify markets rather than invalidate them. The internet didn’t vanish after the tech bubble collapsed in 2000. Instead, the shakeout separated winners from losers while the web became the “killer app” that redefined how value is created, delivered, and scaled. Two decades later, the largest companies in the world were built upon that foundation.
AI is on a similar trajectory. The message for data leaders and business executives is simple: Stay the course. Pursue innovation and proceed with investment. Organizations that do not adopt and expand their use of AI will eventually find themselves uncompetitive. Survival in an AI-mediated economy will depend on it…