Every 6 months or so, Ben Evans creates a big presentation around tech industry trends. His most recent one (updated for Nov. 2025) clocks in at a whopping 90 slides. You can see him talk about it at the recent Slush conference. Titled: “AI Eats the World” its a play on the older adage of “Software eating the world” first coined by Marc Andresson in his op-ed in the WSJ back in 2011 and explores AI trends. I think its got some really great content and nuggets, capturing the state of AI at this point in time.
Here are some of my brief thoughts on what was most interesting to me:
I like the framing of AI as a new paradigm shift, where we don’t quite know what it will look like or how it will work fully but encourages taking a look at prior paradigm shift and abstracts patterns that could also apply here to see how things might play out.
The approach of asking “whats the pattern” is useful. Absorb. Innovate. Disrupt. And the idea that we are still in the absorb stage makes sense - tackling the low hanging fruit
I think its a good reminder to call out the fact that back in 1997 there were headlines about the web being dead and yet here we are. This reminds me a bit of the question of what it feels like to stand on this point on a progress/time graph from this great Wait But Why article:
The top 4 tech companies spent $100bn more on AI related capex than all global telco and datacenter build outs now are outpacing office build outs.
US power limitations today are potentially going to be a major issue probhibiting accelerated growth. Worth noting that China does not have this challenge.
While the cloud may seem “old and boring”, only 30% of enterprise workflows sit in the cloud today - reinforcing the notion that new tech takes time. Also interesting to note, 30% of retail transactions today are online, which means 70% is not.
Jevon’s paradox (where technology advances resulting in making a resource more efficient to use and thus cheaper per application it actually results in an increase in demand for said resource) could be at play here with AI being the resource. Making AI more efficient could increase demand as it could dramatically increase productivity. Below is a great graphic from Ben’s presentation, representing how capability 4x’d with the advent of the steam engine.
