Just sometimes the world shifts in a heartbeat and you realise you were right all along. I remember it clearly. In the late 90s I was running an Internet company, building one of the first global ISPs, riding the wave of demand, changing the world. The mantras of the time were “build it and they will come” and “this time it’s different” We thought the old laws of economics didn’t apply. Money poured in, and so did the orders. Sales teams?? All they did was answer the phone and write down the order.

 Then the bubble burst, fortunes were lost, jobs were lost as companies shrank. But underneath all the panic and fear what happened? The Internet quietly went on growing. Real applications began to appear, we slowly began to understand how to manage the monster we had built. Genuine business cases started to provide profit and jobs. Slowly, the world changed.

 I’m older and wiser now and recognise that today we are living through the same cycle with Artificial Intelligence. The hype is deafening, the investment flowing, the promises breathtaking. And just as in the dotcom era, there will be winners and losers. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has himself warned that AI could be in a bubble, echoing the market conditions of the 1990s.

 The parallels are striking. A recent MIT study found that only about 5% of AI pilot programmes achieve rapid revenue growth. The vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on profit and loss. When you strip away the excitement, the story is familiar: technology without leadership rarely delivers.

 Back in the 90s the companies that flourished were those that used the Internet to solve real customer problems, not just to show they were “in on the future”. Amazon, eBay and a handful of others understood that behaviour. They were leadership driven and relentless about business benefit. The rest burned through cash and disappeared.

 The same will be true of AI. Leaders who ask “what problem does this solve for my business, my customers, my people?” will unlock extraordinary value. Those who simply bolt AI onto existing processes will see costs without returns.

AI is an extraordinary tool, perhaps the most important technology of this century so far. But the key is not the model or the algorithm, it is leadership. The companies that succeed will be those whose leaders combine vision with discipline, using AI where it creates measurable advantage.

 In the 2000s I saw the Internet shift from hype to necessity. I believe we are at exactly the same inflection point today with AI. The difference between stalled projects and lasting impact will be the same as it was then: clarity of purpose, leadership commitment and a relentless focus on solving real problems.

 Who else sees these parallels?