The World That Comes After It

I feel like I can see the future.

Not perfectly. Not the companies that win, the models we use, or what we’ll call any of this. But I think I can see the direction.

For most of the digital era, we have adapted ourselves to technology. We learned the interfaces. Opened the apps. Navigated the menus. Searched for the information. Clicked the buttons.

I remember hearing the idea of ambient technology almost a decade ago — technology that gradually disappears into the environment around us. I think AI may finally make that idea real.

McKinsey recently discussed part of this transition as moving from “clicks to conversations.” I think it goes further than that.

Clicks → conversations → ambient intelligence.

Instead of learning how to operate technology, we increasingly just express intent. We speak. We ask. We delegate. Eventually, perhaps, we barely notice the technology at all.

It understands the context, coordinates the systems underneath it, and acts.

That is the puck I’m trying to skate toward.

Because eventually, “AI” itself may become ordinary. Invisible. Just part of how work gets done. Just… tech.

And that is exactly why now matters.

Right now, I happen to be watching that technological transition collide with three enormous forces in financial services:

• $124T of wealth is expected to change hands through 2048. (Cerulli Associates)

• 105,887 advisors — 37.4% of the industry — are expected to retire over the next decade, representing 41.4% of industry assets. (Cerulli Associates)

• AI is entering a historic capital cycle: Goldman Sachs estimates $765B of AI CapEx in 2026, rising to $1.6T annually by 2031. (Goldman Sachs)

Think about what happens when those curves intersect.

Capital is changing hands. The people managing it are changing. And the interface between humans and institutions is changing with them.

Voice AI. Agents. Ambient computing. Autonomous workflows.

These may look like separate technology trends today. I increasingly think they are pieces of the same transition.

Technology is moving from something we operate to something that operates around us.

And financial institutions are an incredible place to watch that transition happen because the constraints are so unforgiving.

Money has to be protected. Customers have to trust. Regulators have to understand. Systems have to work. And someone ultimately has to be accountable.

So being inside this transition now means getting to watch institutions decide: What can a machine know? What can it say? What can it do? What should remain human? What happens when the interface disappears but responsibility doesn’t?

Those questions feel much bigger to me than AI.

They are questions about how institutions — and eventually humans — operate when intelligence becomes embedded in the environment around us.

And that is why I don’t think the goal is to become an “AI person.”

Models will change. Interfaces will disappear. Today’s breakthrough will become tomorrow’s infrastructure.

But the more capable the technology becomes, the more convinced I am that the scarce things become deeply human: judgment, taste, trust, courage, clarity.

If intelligence becomes abundant, discernment becomes more valuable.

So I’m trying to skate past the technology itself. Toward the world the technology creates.

To be close enough to this transition that, when AI becomes ordinary, I have already learned how institutions change, how capital moves, how humans and machines divide responsibility, how decisions get made, how trust gets built, and how people behave when the ground beneath them starts moving.

Maybe that is the opportunity of this moment.

Not merely learning the technology.

Learning the world that comes after it.