Dear CIO,

Throughout history, major technological revolutions have not transformed society the moment they emerged in laboratories or industrial plants. Their full impact only arrived when financial capital, once concentrated in speculative bubbles or infrastructure build-outs, finally shifted toward consumer-facing applications.

This newsletter will build on Carlota Perez’s framework of technological revolutions and financial capital to argue that every great wave of change experiences a consumer tipping point, what I call the ChatGPT moment. This moment represents the democratization of a technology when consumers gain direct access, behavior changes at scale, and markets realign around new mass demand.

Best Regards,
John, Your Enterprise AI Advisor

When Financial Capital Meets Consumers

Financial Capital and Technology Revolutions

Perez shows that each technological revolution passes through two key phases:

The ChatGPT moment, in this lens, is the cultural inflection point where deployment takes off, and financial capital discovers mass consumer markets.

Historical ChatGPT Moments

Transistors → Television

The transistor was first created for military and industrial purposes, but it only became a household technology when financial investment fueled the growth of television manufacturing and broadcasting networks. It was ultimately consumers, rather than corporations, whose demand and adoption drove the scale that sparked the electronics revolution.

Internet → Web Browser

The internet had existed for decades within government and academic circles, but the true turning point came with the invention of the web browser, which allowed ordinary people to navigate and create content. This breakthrough unleashed a surge of venture capital into internet startups, reshaping the economy and accelerating the internet’s expansion into everyday life.

AI → ChatGPT

Artificial intelligence has long existed in labs, specialized software, and narrow applications, but the release of ChatGPT placed AI directly in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. This consumer-facing interface ignited a wave of investment while simultaneously reshaping public imagination and accelerating business adoption.

Quantum Computing → (Future TBD)

This one has not achieved its ChatGPT moment and is a bit speculative. Quantum computing is still in its early stages, largely confined to research labs and specialized firms, but its transformative moment will come when financial capital supports a consumer-accessible application, whether a browser-like tool, a gaming engine, or an everyday optimization assistant. Until that point, quantum computing remains a field of potential rather than a full-fledged revolution.

The Pattern: Financial Capital as Consumer Catalyst

From all these cases, we see a recurring pattern:

This explains why technological revolutions feel sudden. Society only perceives them when finance redirects toward consumer-facing products. The ChatGPT moment is thus the visible ignition point of a technological revolution. Technologies may be invented in labs, but revolutions are made in living rooms.