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One of the things that’s just so fascinating about AI is how rapidly things can change. At the start of 2025, the major players, OpenAI, Microsoft, developing these new models, thinking they’re ahead of everybody in the world. And then, bam, this little startup from China called DeepSeek introduces a new model as good or better than any of the existing models out there. And in a day, a trillion dollars of valuation of those companies is gone.
“Yeah. John, we’ve got a bit of a tech sell-off this morning, and it’s being caused by earth-shattering developments in the AI space.”
An enormous uncertainty about, you know, the progression and profitability of the industry rises. And so I think it’s just an illustration of how rapidly the landscape can just shift in very fundamental ways, and we have every reason to expect that that’s going to continue to happen.
When I talk about AI, I often put up two slides. The first is the dinosaur admiring an incoming asteroid, and the second is a surfer surfing a very large wave. You cannot afford to be the dinosaur. You must be the surfer. You need to be agile. You need to be adaptive. You need to embrace these systems and try out what’s going on because if you don’t understand it, you really can’t hope to help your organization adapt and stay in front of this momentous, world-changing technology.
I’m Michael Watkins. I’m a professor of leadership and organizational change at the IMD Business School. I write extensively about leadership, about strategic thinking, and about the impact of AI on both.