MBI Daily Dose (July 06, 2025)

Companies or topics mentioned in today's Daily Dose: Inflection Point for AI adoption in enterprise, Airbnb and host experience

I listened to this AlphaSense interview of Head of Generative AI Strategy at Cerebras (free trial link here). The expert forecasts that within the next 6–12 months enterprises will unleash a wave of previously-shelved use cases, which may be bit of an inflection point for AI adoption in enterprises.

Having said that, the amount of capex is also an uncomfortable reminder that ROI needs to deliver in a major way in not-so-distant future for even some of the most profitable companies in the world to be able to keep investing here. It may not be likely that everyone will enjoy compelling ROI across the board. So, the big question to me is not that whether AI capex will have compelling ROI, but rather how the value creation will be distributed among the current crop of Big Tech (and beyond).

Following up on my Airbnb experience mentioned yesterday.

I had an opportunity to chat with my Airbnb host yesterday for 30 minutes whom I stumbled onto while walking around the pond at the property.

I asked about her experience of being a host at Airbnb. She has been an Airbnb host for 5+ years. She only listed the property on Airbnb and seemed quite happy with the steady stream of income she was able to generate from the platform. She did have one complaint though. Airbnb once put her property on hold for 10 days once a guest brought their dog despite her “no pet policy”. It’s not clear what the guest said to Airbnb, but Airbnb took the side of the guest and “punished” the host by making the property unavailable to book for 10 days. The whole process took place over a chat interface. This happened early last year, so by that time she already hosted on Airbnb for four years and had almost 100 glowing reviews from guests. She was so livid with that experience that she considered leaving Airbnb altogether but decided against it later.

While I have no comment on her specific incident, I do think it is a growing pain in a world dominated by large scaled tech platforms. While with AI into the scene it can potentially feel even more dehumanizing experience going forward, I think there is also a potential scenario that some of these companies may feel empowered to provide a better customer experience leveraging actual persons precisely because AI will handle almost all of the routine issues.

Zuckerberg actually talked about this potential a couple of months ago:

“…it wouldn't make sense to staff out calling for everyone. But let's say AI can handle 90% of that. Then if it can't, it kicks it off to a person. If you get the cost of providing that service down to one-tenth of what it would've otherwise been, then maybe now it actually makes sense to do it. That would be cool. So the net result is that I actually think we're probably going to hire more customer support people.

The common belief is that AI will automate jobs away. But that hasn't really been how the history of technology has worked. Usually, you create things that take away 90% of the work, and that leads you to want more people, not less.”

Of course, it would be politically incorrect for Zuck to paint out a world where the technology he’s investing billions in would replace a vast swath of labor. Nonetheless, while thinking about AI’s potential, I am often reminded Benedict Evans’ joke on this point:

“The joke I make about this is that before Excel, investment bankers used to work really long hours. But now, thanks to Excel, Goldman Sachs associates can finish their work at lunchtime on Friday and go home. … What actually happened is that when you gave everybody Excel you do more analysis, not less—because if you can answer in five minutes instead of a week you just ask more questions.”

The question in any major tech transition is, of course, whether this time it is indeed different.

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Please note that these are NOT my recommendation to buy/sell these securities, but just disclosure from my end so that you can assess potential biases that I may have because of my own personal portfolio holdings. Always consider my write-up my personal investing journal and never forget my objectives, risk tolerance, and constraints may have no resemblance to yours.