Amazon.com Chair Bezos says societal benefits from AI will be ‘gigantic’

Comments from this week’s Italian Tech Week 2025 interview: “The thing that happens when people get very excited as they are today about artificial intelligence for example is every experiment gets funded. Every company gets funded. the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And so that’s also probably happening today. Um, but it doesn’t mean that anything that’s happening isn’t real. Like AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact, it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer. Today we talk about AI first companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Mestral and so on and so on and so on. There are so many startup companies that are kind of AI companies of various kinds and that’s normal for this phase. But that is not the biggest impact that AI is going to have. The biggest impact that AI is going to have is it is going to affect every company in the world. It is going to make their quality go up and their productivity go up. uh it’s I mean by every company I literally mean every company every manufacturing company every hotel every you know consumer products company etc etc etc and so that is hard to fathom but it’s real there is no doubt we don’t know how long it will take exactly we don’t know how quickly that transition will occur and it’ll probably occur at different rates in different industries but that is very real now what the stock market does, which is when we think of bubbles, we think of valuations and market caps and things like this and how many billions of dollars are being invested in these six people at a $20 billion valuation even though they just started yesterday, right? That’s very unusual behavior. This investors don’t usually give a team of six people a couple of billion dollars with no product. It’s rare and that’s happening today. But the great thing about industrial bubbles, this is a kind of industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. If you go back like the 90s had a biotech bubble and there were a bunch of pharma startup companies that were designing drugs and using new techniques and the world got very excited. The investment world got very excited. as a group, they all lost money. But we did get a couple of life-saving drugs. A bubble like a a banking bubble, a crisis in the banking system, that’s just bad. That’s like 2008. And so that’s you those bubbles society wants to avoid. The ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad. It could even be good because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions. They still get those life-saving drugs. And that’s what’s going to happen here, too. This is real. The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.”