“the AI scare trade is speeding up AI transformation by years at tens of thousands of businesses.” (Nate B. Jones, Feb 19, 2026, Why the Biggest AI Career Opportunity Just Appeared—and Almost Nobody Sees It.)
Anyone who is focused on enterprise AI adoption and heard this on Nate B Jones‘s AI News & Strategy Daily channel or read it on his substack will be concerned about how this all works out on several levels. Let’s look at a few key impacts:
- Your Investments
- Your Career
- Your Business
That list is not in order of importance; it is in order of a sequence of events in history where each of these aspects has had similar drivers. I will be referring to quotes from Why the Biggest AI Career Opportunity Just Appeared—and Almost Nobody Sees It. throughout, and I recommend you watch it after reading this because it has a lot more to offer on other topics, too.
Investments
While I agree that last year was not the AI bubble, there is one coming soon. Anyone that was part of the world of tech in 2000 will see the echo here:
Meanwhile, AI startups, regardless of whether they’re good or not, look relatively more attractive to everybody. You stick AI in the name, and magical things happen right now. Magically, more capital will flow to the AI company that has AI in the name and releases an AI press release than to anybody else. (14:23)
In 1999, companies with “.com” in their name were guaranteed a huge IPO, even if all they had to offer was a cool sock puppet as their mascot. Today, a similar narrative is forming where Wall Street hype and Media hype are creating a hype-vortex, drawing in capital regardless of actual value. When the Dot Bomb blew up the Dot Com Bubble, I watched friends near retirement age having to change their life plans with no choice because it wasn’t just tech stocks that took the hit, and it took the market 15 years to rise back up to the peak of the previous century. Diversification was not a watchword in those days; even for those that were diversified, the impact rippled.
Your Career
…the CFO pulling forward cost cuts to demonstrate to investors that management does take this transition seriously. Stock drop doesn’t just reflect reality, it creates reality. A company whose stock craters on AI fears is going to start behaving as if AI is an existential threat. Even if the actual tech is years away from threatening its core business, defensive postures get adopted right away. (4:58 to 5:19)
Lots of people have already had their lives upended by companies determined to show investors that they are becoming more efficient, even (especially?) if they aren’t. This reactive stance often ignores the fundamental reality that human behavior does not move at the speed of a GPU (see Your AI-Driven Digital Transformation is Impeded by Behavioral Challenges).
There are lots of takeaways from the video on this, so, again, watch it after reading this. Meanwhile, a recurring theme on the channel is that if you aren’t thinking about how you can learn to use AI and then figure out how to become more efficient with AI, your career is going to be in trouble. This will come later for some industries as a whole, and for individual businesses because, contrary to media hype, not everyone is going to be making the shift at the same time and certainly not at the same pace. But it is coming, and the speed it is coming at keeps increasing.
There were a lot of people who changed careers in the late 90s into a track that was tied to the .com boom. Only a few survived and then thrived in the rebuild. Of the rest, the lucky ones were able to resurrect their former skills and return to their previous work. The rest often drifted from job to job, sometimes finding a new track, and sometimes not.
Your Business
And because of the prominence of the American stock market, there are boards all over the world looking at this. Now visibility like this is what turns a slow trend into an urgent capital reallocation in favor of AI. I’m not kidding when I say the AI scare trade is speeding up AI transformation by years at tens of thousands of businesses. The scare trade is a transfer of career capital from the people who treated AI as somebody else’s problem to the people who have been invested in understanding it. (27:59 to 28:24)
The above quote is what inspired this post. I’ve been advocating for a while now that most businesses have been going all wrong about how they are adopting AI. They are buying the tools and then trying to figure out how to use them. This approach often fails to account for the competitive disadvantage smaller firms face when racing against the scale of industry giants (see Why Bigger Companies Move Faster than You in the AI Adoption Race).
Companies are looking at how others are using tools and assuming it is the tool that is making it work, so they start mimicking the behavior they can see and failing miserably because what makes the tools work is not the results, it is the process of adoption and growth. That is why for every Chase or Walmart example, there are 10 AWS or Replit incidents. Many of those don’t go reported because they happened to a business the size of yours, rather than one that is currently getting media focus on a regular basis.
It’s clear that some businesses are going to rush into their AI adoption approach. Some already have. Some will be like children that touch the hot stove (healing in a couple of weeks and exercising caution), and a few may even become great chefs. Others will be more like the fictional inventor from The Expanse, but without the rest of the world benefiting from his demise:
Lesson learned? Faster is better when you build speed, not when you jump straight from 0 to splat.
Post title inspired by both Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner’s Guide and Zen in the Art of Archery. While the title Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the inspiration for the former, Zen in the Art of Archery is much more along the lines of this post and the AI adoption, though truthfully the adoption of AI, like your situation, is unique unto itself.
Looking for help adopting AI in your organization? Let’s talk. Tag me in a comment or reach out directly with a connection request.
© Scott S. Nelson