AI Reality Check for CEOs

ChatGPT’s surge hides costly traps. CEOs must focus on trust, monetisation and real productivity gains, not hype.

• ChatGPT’s explosive growth masks shallow engagement and unpredictable returns for enterprise investments.

• Productivity gains are mostly incremental editing and decision support, not sweeping job automation.

• Trust, monetisation, and careful rollout, not raw scale, will determine who profits from generative AI.

  

  Olivia Moore partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Picture the scene: your CFO is pressing for AI-driven cost cuts. Your board is dazzled by reports of 700 million weekly users on ChatGPT, 2.6 billion messages a day, and headlines calling it the “new electricity.” The market seems to roar one message; go big, now.

Pause. Beneath the flood of impressive numbers lies a set of hard truths that could upend hasty investments. Independent economists, sharp-eyed investors like Olivia Moore, and fresh academic research all tell a subtler story: ChatGPT is transforming habits, but the economic value for business is far murkier than the hype suggests.

And here’s the deeper reality: none of us has the full playbook yet. This is an unfolding technology. Certainty is an illusion. The real competitive edge will come from how fast your company learns, adapts, and tests in the dark, not from pretending to know the ending.

The Mirage of Scale