As AI accelerates from niche innovation to foundational infrastructure, financial advisers must understand the transformative impact this technology is having across industries and portfolios.
With AI adoption outpacing even the internet’s meteoric rise, the implications for business models, competitive strategy, and investment opportunities are profound. In this article, Neil Shah, Director of Content and Strategy at Edison Group, explores how AI is reshaping the economic landscape—and why advisers must be ready to guide clients through the coming disruption.
We are witnessing an unprecedented technological inflection point. In just a few short years, artificial intelligence has gone from cutting-edge research to critical infrastructure across every major industry. The numbers tell a remarkable story: AI user adoption is happening 5.5 times faster than the internet’s initial rollout, with ChatGPT reaching 800 million weekly users in just 17 months, a pace of adoption we’ve never seen before in human history.
New operating reality
AI is quickly becoming the backbone of the modern enterprise. Companies like Shopify and Duolingo are going “AI-first,” embedding AI into daily workflows across the org chart. This goes beyond automation. It’s about rethinking how work gets done from the ground up.
For instance, Bank of America’s virtual assistant, Erica, has handled more than 2 billion customer interactions. At JPMorgan, AI and machine learning are driving up to 65% increases in operational value. Now, AI tools aren’t just tools. They are now reshaping how entire businesses function.
The scope of transformation extends far beyond white-collar work. Tesla has logged over 1 billion miles of autonomous driving, while Waymo now accounts for more than a quarter of San Francisco’s rideshare trips with autonomous vehicles. In agriculture, AI-powered systems like Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder have processed over 230,000 acres, eliminating weeds without chemicals. This represents a fundamental shift where AI becomes embedded in the physical world, not just digital interfaces.
New competitive landscape
Competition is escalating as AI breaks down the barriers between digital and physical industries. The “Big Six” U.S. technology companies—Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta—have increased their combined R&D and capital expenditures to over $500 billion annually, primarily driven by AI investments.
But it’s not just the incumbents driving change. AI-native companies are scaling faster than anything we’ve seen before. OpenAI, for example, has reached $9.2 billion in annualized revenue in under three years.
Globally, the race is heating up. Chinese companies like DeepSeek have rapidly closed the performance gap with U.S. models while operating at a fraction of the cost. This represents more than technological competition. What’s unfolding isn’t just a battle for market share, but a geopolitical race for long-term influence and leadership.
Perhaps most significantly, open-source AI models are democratising access to frontier capabilities. Meta’s LLaMA models have been downloaded over 1.2 billion times, while Huggin Face now hosts over 1.1 million AI models, a 33x inrease in just two years. This explosion of accessible AI tools means that competitive advantages based solely on access to AI are rapidly eroding.
Growth transformation
AI is creating entirely new categories of value creation while accelerating growth in traditional sectors. In enterprise software, for instance, Anysphere’s Cursor AI tool scaled from $1 million to $300 million in annual recurring revenue in just over two years. Specialised AI applications are emerging across every major industry, from healthcare, including Abridge’s clinical conversation AI, to legal services, including Harvey’s workflow automation, to financial services, such as AlphaSense’s research platform. .
The infrastructure supporting this growth is staggering. Global data center construction value increased 49% annually over the past two years, while NVIDIA’s data center revenue grew 78% year-over-year to $39 billion. Yet this massive capital investment is driving down the cost of AI inference by 99.7% since 2022, creating a virtuous cycle where lower costs enable broader adoption, which drives further innovation and scale.
Strategic imperative
For executives and boards, the message is clear: AI is not a trend. It’s a foundational shift. The gap between AI leaders and laggards is widening rapidly. Companies that embrace AI-first operating models, invest in AI-native talent, and reimagine their core value propositions around intelligent automation will define the next era of business success.
This moment mirrors the digital revolution of the 1990s, but it’s moving much faster. Just as companies that failed to embrace the internet lost ground, those that don’t fundamentally integrate AI into their operations, competitive strategy, and growth models risk obsolescence.
The real question isn’t if AI will reshape your business. Rather, it’s whether you’ll lead that change or be overtaken by those who do. In an era where artificial intelligence is becoming as fundamental as electricity or the internet, the companies that thrive will be those that recognise AI not as a tool, but as the new foundation upon which all business advantage is built.
