“Investors don’t usually give a team of six people a couple of billion dollars with no product. It’s rare and that’s happening today.”
— Jeff Bezos answers a question during Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. In this part of the video, he is talking about AI and the potential it will have to transform the rest of industry. He recognizes that we are going through, what he calls, a period where people get very excited. “The second thing that happens when people get very excited as they are today about artificial intelligence for example is every experiment gets funded.” But he also talks about the fact that we have yet to see the biggest impact of AI. He argues that the real value of this technology will only be fully realized when it stops being a standalone product and becomes a foundational layer adopted by every other industry. According to Bezos, the true, lasting transformation will come from this widespread implementation, which will unlock massive gains in productivity across the entire economy. He contrasts this future potential with the current, more narrow focus on the AI-builders themselves: “Today we talk about AI first companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Mestral and so on and so on and so on. There are so many startup companies that are kind of AI companies of various kinds and that’s normal for this phase. But that is not the biggest impact that AI is going to have.” We can definitely say he is one of the people who need to push this narrative, but at the same time, not many people have the type of vantage point that he has. (Link in the first comment if you want to watch the full interview.) In the spirit of transparency, I used an AI to help refine the phrasing of this very post—a small but practical example of the value I’ve come to appreciate.