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AI promising everything – Is it Snake Oil or the Silver Bullet?

Don't Panic!

I survived the dot-com burst as a co-founder. Then spent 25 years implementing every transformation framework that followed: ITIL, Agile, Cloud, SAFe

I implemented process frameworks for executives while coaching agile methods with teams – living the contradiction daily

Now it's AI: Call me Cassandra – The mistakes ahead are predictable, I have seen them before

The Waves

Internet was going to transform everything – I navigated the burst – built financial market systems – I survived when competitors didn't and sold later.

Isometric illustration of winding staircases lined with vintage computers and servers.

Then came the methodology waves

ITIL would fix IT (I implemented it, watched it become bureaucracy). Agile would fix ITIL (I implemented it, watched it become ceremony). Cloud would fix everything (same story). Now AI.

Isometric illustration of marble staircases and geometric cubes connected by glowing threads, with a figure walking up the stairs.

The Pattern

Every wave follows the same arc:

Big promises – Optimization obsession – Complexity accumulation – Expensive theater – Poor implementation blamed – Collapse under its own weight – Next wave arrives

Isometric illustration centered on a glowing brain made of circuit patterns, surrounded by staircases and screens.

The Difference

AI follows the same pattern but...

AI is a ruthless enhancer of everything. The amplitude and the frequency.

I help you use the power without repeating the mistakes. Not because I studied the pattern in business school. Because I've made every expensive mistake already – at executive and team level, with process frameworks and agile methods, through multiple technology waves.

You don't need another framework. You need someone who knows how to navigate complexity

What ↓   So What β†’   Now What β†’

You're looking at a Klein Bottle: A surface with no inside or outside that truly exists only in four-dimensional space. Watch it glide through itself – mathematically impossible in 3D, yet here it rotates anyway.

This isn't coincidence: Modern AI language models work similarly. Their attention mechanisms connect words across hundreds of dimensions – something our brains can't visualize, but Transformer models do millions of times daily. Five years ago, this was science fiction. Today these systems write your emails.

The Klein Bottle is the most honest metaphor for AI transformation: Elegant, paradoxical, and surprisingly mundane once you accept you'll never fully understand it.

Vertigo? Don't Panic! – that's the trick

The AI Bubble and how it evolved

What You're Actually Watching

This isn't a financial bubble. It's an industrial bubble.

Jeff Bezos got this right (Italian Tech Week, October 2025): The money is real. The infrastructure is real. The technology works. What's also real? Every experiment gets fundedβ€”good ideas, bad ideas, ideas that contradict each other.

The difference matters:

Financial bubbles leave nothing. The dot-com crash wiped out $5 trillionβ€”but those wasteful fiber networks? They became the internet's backbone.

Industrial bubbles create lasting infrastructure even when half the experiments fail: Data centers. GPU clusters. Training datasets. Model architectures. The picks and shovels are already deployed.

But here's what the visualization shows that Bezos didn't say:

Oligopoly formation happens faster than transformation.

Watch the timeline again. Microsoft-OpenAI at the center by 2023. NVIDIA providing infrastructure. Google-Anthropic as counter-position. Everyone else connects to this topology or builds on top of it.

By 2025 Q4: Oligopoly established. Network density up 10x. OpenAI centrality above 60%.

Most enterprises were still writing their "AI strategy" documents.

The question isn't "Is AI real?" (It is.)

The question is: Do you know which buttons cause collapse?

Because unlike the dot-com eraβ€”where you could wait, learn, adopt proven patterns laterβ€”this oligopoly formed faster than most transformation roadmaps got approved!

Industrial bubbles build the future. They just don't care whether you're ready for it.

How we came to the AI-Bubble

AI is by far not the first Bubble

IT has a long tradition of fixing problems from the past by adding a new layer.

Below: 55 years of sediment accumulation.
Each layer was supposed to fix the previous one.
None of them did. All of them are still active.

Click to explore why your enterprise runs ITIL + Agile + SAFe + Platform Engineering simultaneously.

IT has a reputation for destroying beautiful words.
Engineering. Design. Architecture.
Intelligence is the latest victim.

Below: The hype cycles that spawned the methodology sediment.

  • Each wave promised transformation.
  • Each wave delivered complexity and new jobs to manage it.

Methodology

Waterfall (1970) 🧟
Agile Manifesto (2001) πŸ”„
SAFe 1.0 (2011) πŸŽͺ
SAFe 6.0 (2023) ⚰️
Platform Engineering (2021) 🌱

Technology

Dot-com Crash (2000) πŸ’€
Cloud (2009) πŸ†
Blockchain (2018) πŸ“‰
GenAI (2023) β˜„οΈπŸŽ’

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