The argument
The piece treats artificial intelligence as a force amplifier, in the way the engines of the Industrial Revolution were: not good or bad in itself, but something that restructures society, labour and power. It argues the gains will be distributed by contest rather than automatically. Adoption inside firms has moved from casual prompts to embedded workflows. The macroeconomic evidence has not moved with it. Near-term gains to labour-productivity growth are measured in tenths of a percentage point, paced by adoption friction and regulation. Benefits appear at the level of the individual firm well before they appear in national statistics, and the piece calls the output that flatters headline figures in the meantime Ghost GDP. That gap between adoption and measured productivity is what the argument rests on. Exposure today is concentrated in office and professional work: computing, legal, business and financial roles, with clerical tasks at the top of the gradient. Task content, not industry label, defines the frontier. Automation reaches office work before it reaches physical infrastructure such as substations and steel plants. HALO, heavy assets and low obsolescence, is the piece’s term for the businesses on the other side of that line: those whose value sits in physical infrastructure rather than in professional headcount. They can use AI to improve margins without breaking their revenue model. Predictive maintenance, outage forecasting and asset health monitoring lower cost. They do not replace revenue. Regulated or contracted businesses are protected by physical bottlenecks and service agreements, not by seat licences or billable hours. The threat to them arrives later, when AI pairs with cheap and capable robotics, the point the piece calls AI meets atoms. Robotics is moving from pilots to paid deployments but remains constrained by hardware and regulation, so automation reaches these operators in waves rather than all at once.Related
- The next AI bottleneck, the physical build-out behind the same shift.
- What Bordier publishes, the research series this piece belongs to.
- Our approach to investment, the philosophy behind the bank’s portfolio construction.
- Bordier in Singapore, the entity that publishes this series.
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