AI's Biggest Payday May Not Go to the Companies That Invent It

It was 95 degrees outside when Eric Glyman, the chief executive of the corporate spending company Ramp, turned to history for a lesson about artificial intelligence. He brought up air conditioning.

Glyman argues people do not talk about great fortunes made from inventing air conditioning. In his words, “the value that was created out of the ecosystems far exceeded the value that was captured by the people who invented this technology.”

Glyman said he was born in Las Vegas, and argued that the city could not have grown as it did without air conditioning. He pointed to Miami as another place with entire ecosystems that depend on it. His point was that the business built around cooling was worth far more than what went to the people who created the technology.

He does not argue that AI labs will lose. He says some of the labs will become some of the best businesses ever created. His argument is about the share that could accrue elsewhere, because AI's promise can distract people from what else is worth building.

Glyman calls AI "one of the most revolutionary transformations in our life," on a scale beyond the Industrial Revolution. Where industrialization made goods plentiful, he believes AI will make services plentiful.

So Glyman says a better question to ask is what to build in a world in which intelligence is very plentiful, accessible, and cheap. Just as air conditioning made possible cities and activities that had not been possible before, he argues, accessible intelligence will make possible entire new things.

For Ramp, he ties that to money movement. He argues an explosion of accessible intelligence will bring an explosion of payments, by people, by agents acting for people, and by agents in general, and that companies will need a better way to track spending and make each dollar and hour count.