Against the backdrop of a new spate of warnings around artificial intelligence’s potentially existential risks, many companies may be positioned to make, or lose, a lot of money as a result of the booming technology.
According to a new report, $4.7 trillion in global profits is “at stake” in the AI sweepstakes over the decade between 2025 and 2035, as calculated by Bain & Co. That is, that amount represents the total estimated economic impact that will be “created in new categories, shifted among competitors, or lost entirely by those who move too slowly,” Bain wrote.
That impact will dwarf the one associated with the last great technology disruption, the internet, which shifted $1.4 trillion in profits in the 20 years from 1995 to 2015, according to Bain. “AI is bigger, faster and broader, and will penetrate far deeper into the economy than the Internet ever did,” the report said.
Also, where 41% of industry sectors were structurally transformed by the internet, AI will have that effect on 71% of the sectors, according to Bain.
What is behind the large gap in impact? The answer, the report says, is that whereas the internet was a distribution technology, AI is a production technology. The internet collapsed the cost of reaching customers; AI “collapses the cost of producing the product itself — the analysis, the diagnosis, the code, and the physical work of robots and autonomous vehicles,” Bain wrote.
The report broke down the anticipated $4.7 trillion in economic impact by 2035 as follows:
Productivity gains: $1.1 trillion at stake
AI, for example, compresses production cycles in manufacturing, replaces cognitive labor in professional services, and optimizes logistics and operations across physical sectors.
Innovation: $2.2 trillion at stake
The technology foundation — semiconductors, data centers, foundation models — grows with every adopter. Autonomous systems run goods and equipment without a human in the loop. Continuous health monitoring catches disease before symptoms appear.
“AI also offers incumbents singular powers to innovate at their core, across a much broader swath of the economy than the Internet did.”
Market share and competitive shifts: $1.3 million at stake
Bain calculated that about 29% of changes in profit pools will result from “the redistribution of existing products as AI changes who can compete, how cost structures work and what capabilities matter.”
The report advised companies to think less about how AI will disrupt their industry and more about how they will use AI to beat direct competitors. Gaps between fast and slow incumbent adopters of AI will grow quickly, even as fundamentally different competitors enter the fray, according to Bain.
