The overnight success of AI

After a six-year hiatus, venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker has released her first Internet Trends report since 2019.

It’s 340 pages long, and focused entirely on artificial intelligence (AI).

Dubbed “the Queen of the Internet” by Barron’s magazine, Meeker is known for her ability to identify and analyse major technological trends early on.

Her Internet Trends reports were highly influential, and became essential reading in Silicon Valley from 1995 to 2019.

The comeback report uses the word “unprecedented” 51 times, and some of the statistics really put in perspective just how transformational AI has become.

It sets the scene by noting that the document is filled with user, usage and revenue charts that go up-and-to-the-right.

There’s so much interesting stuff in this report, and it’s available on the BOND website, which is the global technology investment firm where Meeker is a partner.

If it feels like change is happening faster than ever, that’s because it is.

ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, something which took Instagram more than two years, Netflix a decade and the telephone 75 years.

In an interview in April, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman suggested the current number of weekly users was close to 800 million.

Market penetration of 10 per cent isn’t too bad, when the entire planet is your market.

There is a raft of other AI tools that people are using daily, such as Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Genesis and Meta AI.

There are also the likes of Claude (a favourite of mine) and Canva AI (the Australian design startup BOND is an investor in).

Usage is surging among consumers, businesses and governments.

Crucially, as Meeker’s report points out, this is hitting the world all at once.

It’s growing across the globe simultaneously, unlike the original World Wide Web in the 1990s, which emerged in the US and spread out over time.

The change we’ve seen over the past couple of years goes beyond the adoption of a new technology.

It’s a behavioural shift that has happened before our eyes, almost overnight.

Hundreds of millions of people have changed the way they approach writing, learning and problem-solving – as well as their work.

We’re even seeing this in my industry, which has traditionally been full of older professionals who aren’t always tech-savvy.

A Deutsche Bank client survey found that the proportion of people extensively using AI for work-related tasks had more than doubled in the first six months of 2025.

As exciting as this is, it’s also incredibly scary for many people.

Entire industries are being disrupted by these advances, and over time this will lead to some jobs becoming less relevant, or even obsolete.

Basic data entry, customer services helpdesks and elements of legal services are some of the groups expected to be most at risk in the coming decade.

Writing and content production roles are also regularly cited (I guess that’s me), as are routine accounting and financial services.

These jobs won’t disappear entirely, but they will shift and maybe that’ll be for the better.

AI could prove an extremely useful tool, making workers more productive and unlocking exciting innovations.

History is littered with examples of technological advances bringing significant change for workers.

The agricultural revolution of the early 20th century is probably the most comparable example.

In the 19th century more than half the US workforce was involved in farming. Then came the industrial revolution, and by the 1920s that proportion had collapsed to barely 20 per cent.

In recent decades, it’s been the internet and mobile phones that have changed the way we communicate, shop, and consume entertainment.

David Autor, an American economics professor at MIT, estimates that 60 per cent of the jobs people are doing these days simply didn’t exist in 1940.

While change is disconcerting for those affected, society adjusts over time and displaced workers are absorbed elsewhere in the economy.

However, it could be a faster and more disruptive transition this time around.

Meeker’s data suggests that AI adoption curves are steeper than those of other major technological shifts in recent decades.

The long-term improvement in living standards and productivity growth will come at a short-term cost, and policymakers will need to think carefully about how to provide support.

For investors, it’s a theme we can’t afford to ignore.

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