There is some AI fatigue setting in, which is quite a thing to feel while standing under a billboard advertising it. Midtown has them on every corner. Even so, one message came through clearly this month: upskilling is now a priority for every serious firm, and the larger ones are already well into it.
Billboards everywhere
Walk through Midtown Manhattan and AI is being sold to you from every surface. It already feels like a technology no one can operate without. The hype is real. So are the questions sitting just underneath it.
A trillion dollars in a circle
Scrutiny is building around the economics, and rightly. People are asking hard questions about circular deals, and about an entire economy leaning on roughly a trillion dollars moving between about seven tech giants. Money that goes round a small enough circle starts to look less like a market and more like a hall of mirrors. Investors and users alike are beginning to tap on the glass.
The sideline is not a strategy
For family offices the moment cuts two ways. Most organisations are actively upskilling, some staff are already losing jobs as the capability spreads, and plenty of offices are still watching from the sidelines with no strategy for stepping in.
That gap will cost them, and it is worth being blunt about why. Sitting out feels like the safe, neutral choice. It is not. As AI reshapes finance and healthcare, the offices that put off building AI literacy fall behind on two fronts at once, the investment case and the operational one, and both compound while you wait.
The question was never whether AI matters. It plainly does. The question is how a family office engages with it well: seeing where the value actually sits, ignoring the noise being sold from the billboards, and building enough in-house capability to make its own calls. That conversation should have started last month. Failing that, now.
Next week we release our annual report on technology and software in family offices. It maps where innovation is happening, where capital is flowing, and, more tellingly, where it still is not. One thread kept surfacing in this month's conversations: the slow pace of wealthtech may owe less to weak demand and more to how little venture money flows into the sector. Friction for some. An opening for anyone paying attention.