The youthful phase of AI is over. Santoli said it. The guy who talks on CNBC between commercials for tax software and reverse mortgages has declared the honeymoon finished.
AI is now unpopular with the public. This matters to investors the same way a teenager's opinion on mortgage-backed securities matters to the Fed. Which is to say it doesn't. But here we are, pretending consumer sentiment moves enterprise software contracts.
Order backlogs beyond a few quarters are now suspect. Translation: nobody knows what happens next, same as always, but we're using the word "suspect" to sound like we knew something before. We didn't. Analysts were pricing in seventeen years of exponential growth on companies that sell chatbots to HR departments. Now they're repricing to sixteen years. This is called analysis.
The narrative flipped. Love how that works. Six months ago you were a Luddite for questioning if every call center needed a billion-dollar language model. Now you're a visionary for saying the exact same thing. The stock didn't change. The earnings didn't change. The narrative changed. Which is another way of saying a guy on television used different words.
Retail traders saw AI go from the future of humanity to overpriced garbage in nine months. They bought at the top both times. Bought the story when it was hot. Bought the dip when it wasn't. Currently Googling "what is a backlog" and hoping their $47 in fractional shares survives the repricing.
The risk is now the focus. Not the revenue. Not the margins. The risk. As if risk wasn't always there, hiding behind the PowerPoints and the synchronized analyst upgrades. But sure, let's pretend this is new information and not just Santoli filling airtime between the opening bell and lunch.
The youthful phase is over, which means we've entered the middle-aged phase where everyone pretends they were cautious all along.
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
Leave a Comment