A former karaoke company with $6m in market cap and less than $2m in quarterly revenue just crashed the entire logistics sector.
And that's why you might not get a choice about AI.
Algorithm Holdings, previously known as The Singing Machine Company, I sh*t you not - put out a press release in February claiming their new logistics platform could scale freight volumes by 300-400% without adding headcount. Within hours, C.H. Robinson Worldwide, a proper freight giant, saw its stock plunge 24%. The Russell 3000 trucking index had its worst day in years - literally billions in market cap … gone!
Was the press release credible? No. Was the timeline "delusional" as one analyst put it? Probably. Did Wall Street care? Not even slightly.
And it wasn't just logistics. An AI announcement from Palantir repriced every company selling enterprise software on a per-seat basis. Anthropic releasing legal workflow tools wiped $285bn from SaaS legal tech stocks - the Jefferies trading desk actually called it the "SaaS acalypse." A startup nobody had heard of launching an AI tax planning tool sent Raymond James down 8.8% and Charles Schwab down 7.4%. Private credit firms, commercial real estate, wealth management - all hammered, not on any actual disruption or basis of fact … but on the fear of it.
And this is why you might not have a choice but to start embracing AI: The market has developed what one analyst called an autoimmune disorder - it can no longer tell real threats from exaggerated ones and so it's attacking everything. And the thing about an autoimmune disorder is that it doesn't matter whether the attack is rational. What matters is that the expectation has shifted ... and your competitors and clients are now operating inside that expectation.
So - If your competitors have shareholders, those shareholders will force them to embrace AI - because if they don't, the market will punish them as though they're already losing. Which means you will end up competing with someone who has. And given the 10x potential on productivity and growth, you really don't want to be the person who hasn't.
And if your clients are public companies, or trying to behave like one, then they will be expecting similar gains from you. On cost, speed, output. I'm sorry, but that's where this is going.
So... how will you keep up with them without breaking your people?
Look - I know it might seem self-serving for an AI consultancy to be saying all this, and honestly, it is. But I also know that if I were still running a business at the scale I used to, this logic would be keeping me up at night and I'd want to partner with someone who could actually help me move fast. A couple of Google Gems does not pass muster, by the way. Ask me how I know. There is a solution to all this.
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