Three big cloud vendors announced earnings recently, with each accelerating their growth thanks to AI. Nvidia, for its part, became the first company to top $5 trillion in market cap, also thanks to AI. While there’s almost certainly some “irrational exuberance” baked into AI adoption, spurred by FOMO across global enterprises, the reality is that we’re nowhere near AI saturation.
Here’s why. AI has yet to touch mainstream applications at mainstream enterprises, and it won’t until it solves some critical (and boring) issues like security. As I’ve noted, “We may like the term ‘vibe coding,’ but smart developers are forcing the rigor of unit tests, traces, and health checks for agent plans, tools, and memory.” They’re focused on “boring” because it’s key to real, sustainable enterprise adoption.
Getting past buzzwords
As an industry, we sometimes like to pretend that buzzwords drive adoption. “Open always wins,” declares Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch. He’s obviously wrong, as even a cursory history of technology adoption shows. There are some obvious success stories for open software (Linux, the Apache HTTP Server, etc.), but there are far more examples of closed systems winning. That’s not to say one is better than the other, but simply to point out how our casual indifference to how enterprise adoption actually works can blind us to the hard work necessary to drive real adoption.
