November 2022. For many of us, our hearts skipped a beat upon our first encounter with ChatGPT. It was not superficial technological fascination, but the vertigo of recognizing that something fundamental had just changed.
Initial perplexity gave way to frantic exploration, and then projection: we understood that our work—whatever it was—would be “mechanized” and “increased” in impact in ways we could barely imagine. We buckled up, held our breath. And there we continue.
Almost three years later, AI has delivered only part of that promise. It has become the determining factor to improve the return on investments, to optimize business processes.
The granularity of the business, managed on a mammoth scale and in real time. Every euro is measured, predicted, scaled. It’s palpable, yes. But also claustrophobic.
This is all very good. But it has fallen short of the vertigo of change we expected. And, above all, the desire to reinvent everything, for the better, seems to have deflated.
As an example of this disenchantment, PwC’s 28th Global CEO Survey—4,701 leaders in 109 countries—reveals that AI has significantly boosted revenue and operating profitability in major economic sectors. CEOs hope that next year it will continue to be like this.
They are robust figures. But they reveal something deeper: we are using AI to do the same thing, better. To get faster, farther, more efficiently—like when we went from horse-drawn carriage to automobile. But we still haven’t changed what it means to “travel.”
In fact, the will to take flight is short, with only 7% of corporate income comes from fundamentally new businesses, created in the last five years. A penchant for creative paralysis that is difficult to understand; especially when 42% of CEOs believe that their company will not be viable in ten years if it continues on its current trajectory.
The paradox is brutal: We know that we must transform, but we settle for optimizing.
Obviously, this behavior is short-term, encouraged by the pressures of public financial markets that demand quarterly results. In this system, CEOs—responsible for protecting and enhancing shareholder value—keep their sights on the short term, expecting to remain, for the most part, between 3 and 5 years in their respective positions.
Enough to make cash on a personal basis, even if the company does not survive. As if that were not enough, with this short-term view, the radical transformation causes rejection in the boards of directors. It’s a luxury that few can afford when the next earnings call is just around the corner.
So, at the end of the day, although discovering LLMs took our breath away, it appears that the CEO’s tenure in office is the factor with the greatest impact on the invention of a new business reality.
PwC data demonstrates this: CEOs with higher expected tenure are significantly more likely to take multiple transformation actions, report AI gains, and use robust decision-making techniques. The difference isn’t just time—it’s mindset.
But how many of these leaders are really entrepreneurs? How many rose to office because of their ability to imagine the impossible, versus their ability to execute the predictable?
And what happens beyond the corporate leadership? Since access to LLMs is democratic, Shouldn’t disruption emerge from below, from the margins, from digital garages?
History suggests not. Through the centuries, human creativity seems to have a perverse relationship with comfort. Genius springs not from accessible opportunity, but from visceral fear of extinction. The world wars not only destroyed—they catalyzed.
From the ashes of 1945 emerged massive antibiotics, nuclear energy, modern computing, commercial jets, the welfare state. Because? Because the alternative was to disappear. When death is at the door, the imagination becomes wild, urgent, ruthlessly practical.
The Great Depression ushered in the New Deal and reconfigured the social contract. The Oil Crisis of the 1970s accelerated energy efficiency and research into renewables. AIDS unleashed a revolution in antiviral treatments that transformed pharmacology. Even the space race was a child of the existential terror of the Cold War, not of scientific romanticism.
What do these moments have in common? The shared sense that the status quo is unsustainable. That either we invent or we die. That there is no plan B.
Do we have that feeling now? Apparently not. Although 42% of CEOs believe their company will die within a decade, they continue to behave as if they have time.
They optimize agony instead of re-imagining life. Don’t they really believe in their own extinction? Or does corporate death not feel like death when you have a golden parachute waiting for you?
Perhaps the problem is not that we lack the tool—AI is already here, available, powerful. The problem is that we lack the right fear. Not the superficial panic of losing market share, but the existential terror that human genius has historically awakened.
At the moment, although production processes have improved, we continue to dress the same. Eating the same. Communicating the same. Moving the same.
Are we in a period of hibernation? Perhaps true transformation requires an entire generation—not three years, but twenty. Maybe we need AI natives, those who They never knew a world without it, they reach leadership positions with an imagination not conditioned by the before.
Or perhaps we need something more fundamental: leaders willing to go all-in on a vision that can’t be quantified on a spreadsheet. Artists using AI like Picasso used oil paint—not to paint horses faster, but to deconstruct reality itself. Scientists who see it not as a paper accelerator, but as a telescope towards the unknown.
AI has given us the power of infinite granularity—to optimize every decision, every interaction, every dollar. It is an extraordinary achievement. But Human creativity does not live in granularity. It lives in the jumps, in the contradictions, in the questions that no one is asking yet.
PwC data tells us that CEOs know they must transform. Who recognize the urgency. But between knowing and doing there is a chasm.
The key question is not whether AI is enough to power change. The question is what we need—as humans—to make the era leap.
AI is already here. The geniuses, no.
The post Thirst for geniuses appeared first on Veritas News.
