The computer revolution was in the 1990s. The AI transformation is playing out now, and hardly anyone has kept evidence showing which side they are on.
TL;DR: Your board will ask what the AI spending bought, and most companies can no longer answer, because nobody measured the work the deployments were about to change. The lag in returns is real, and it sorts the buyers from the beneficiaries. Six sectors out of sixty took 99% of the 1990s gain, and the heaviest spenders missed it. You cannot locate yourself in a distribution without a “before”, and almost nobody took one. Engineering and support kept timestamps, so those baselines can still be recovered.
