Will big corporations stay on top in the AI Industrial Revolution?  Or will a new breed of entrepreneurs gain unprecedented leadership?

Another week, another AI story hits the headlines.  Actually – what am I saying? – another day another multitude of AI stories hit the headlines.

BBC news  reported “ChatGPT told to stop talking so much about goblins, gremlins, trolls, ogres and (also) pigeons and raccoons.”  Apparently alongside telling it to avoid platitudes (something that several people posting on social media might like to consider) it said that it should never talk about the aforementioned creatures “unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query”.  So that’s ChatGPT told off.

Meanwhile AI’s tendency to flatter is doing users no good, as I suspected.  Aside from encouraging an unnatural addiction to robot compliments The Oxford Internet Institute reports that the warmer and friendlier the response to a query is, the more likely it is to be prone to inaccuracies.  Just like an over sympathetic friend in real life then.  The best of friends instead must have a warm heart but a cold mind to help you keep perspective and understand how to sort through problems. 

And currently AI is expensive.  The VP of Applied Deep Learning at Nvidia, Bryan Catanzaro, says that AI is adding to costs rather than improving efficiency for his team at the moment: “The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees”.  Fortune, who reported this, also reflect on a 2024 MIT study that found that the AI automation is viable in only 23 per cent of roles.  In the rest of them people are cheaper, and at the moment more trustworthy.

At a recent and excellent Deloitte round table discussion: “Powered by AI – the future of consumer enterprise” the speaker Deloitte Managing Partner and Gen AI leader, Stacey Winters, showed the results of their 2025 EMEA research.  There is a gaping gap in one statistic in particular.  The survey among nearly 2000 executives showed 100% belief in the positive impact of AI.  Convincing faith then in the power of AI’s transformation of their businesses.  But only 13% of those respondents were currently seeing a return of investment. 

We are at a moment when business models will need to pivot, will need to reinvent in order to get the best outcomes for profit, and for their people. It is a moment in time resonant with the dotcom boom in the 2000s when there was a rush of optimists towards digital platforms, a rearguard of pessimists who resisted change, and a large number of opportunists who made money and gained promotions and prestige from purporting to know more about the unknown than others.  And this led in some, in fact perhaps many cases, to expensive missteps and wasted time. Millions spent on websites that no-one used, divisions launched and then closed down because the business model wasn’t right.  Grand new meaningless titles and board positions that led nowhere.

There is a real need for experimentation in organisations as they navigate what seems to many is the next Industrial Revolution, an era where there are fast technological changes and a radical shift in how people work and what they get paid. And yet, it is difficult to sustain investment in change at scale when there is no return for shareholders and business owners. And you should beware anyone who says they have all the answers because they don’t. All anyone has as far as AI’s future impact on business, (especially autonomous agentic AI), is a set of potential scenarios.

There is one scenario where the first winners in the AI Industrial Revolution will be start up entrepreneurs.  As one startup chair has said to me, you don’t have to worry about changing people’s existing roles if you’re starting again, and you don’t need to cut thousands from your payroll if you’re starting from scratch.  If you can leverage creativity and innovation without having to employ at scale there is a huge opportunity.

Are we entering the new era of entrepreneurialism where scale is irrelevant to success?  Or will big corporations swallow the costs of change, and if so how deep will their resources need to be to ensure they do not get left behind?