Season 7, Post 1: Ahead of the future
Happy New Year to all our readers, welcome to 2025 and the seventh season of the Future Trends Blog. Our mantra, since inception, is to endeavour to remain ahead of the future. Our very first Blog referenced Jeff Bezos and his “day one” mindset. We begin season seven where we started season six: at ASML’s headquarters in Veldhoven. When your author last visited, in November 2024, he was impressed by the sculpture in the company’s lobby, pictured below.
Beyond being a wonderful play on words (read the inscription below the art work), the more serious consideration is how, practically, to stay ahead of the future. Being curious is an obvious starting point. Travelling widely and engaging with a series of expert stakeholders (as we have done consistently) also helps. Another consideration may be leveraging technology to its fullest potential. We have long argued that technology is a means to an end, an enabler to help drive efficient resource allocation.
No technology has dominated headlines more in the last year than AI, and we expect 2025 to be little different (even if we may hear quite a bit more about quantum too). However, the gap between expectations and reality around what AI can practically do continues to widen, in our view. Adoption will also likely remain uneven, we believe.
Advocates will naturally assert that every white-collar worker will soon have an AI copilot or similar. This could, in theory, drive meaningful productivity gains and provoke a golden era of sales. If all works well, AI agents would be able to insert ‘themselves’ upstream from any incumbent system of record, ingest data from disparate sources, and use it to streamline hours of repetitive tasks. Virtual sales development representatives might be able to collect all relevant information on potential customers and manage initial outreach, even before creating a record in an existing system (such as a CRM). Software as a service business models, watch out! A study by OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania found that with access to an LLM, about 15% of all worker tasks in the US could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality.
Your author’s experience remains somewhat more mixed. In late December he spent time along with some of his colleagues on a training course targeted at developing Copilot skills. He was told that we were among the earliest adopters, a claim that might be borne out by the lack of breadth covered in the training course (even assuming a degree of computer literacy at the outset). Copilots are exciting, but they are hardly a panacea. Nonetheless, ‘artificial intelligence engineer’ is apparently the fastest growing job role in the US currently, followed by ‘artificial intelligence consultant’ (per a recent LinkedIn study). We will seek to stay ahead of the future and identify the next big things, whether in AI or elsewhere.
8 January 2025
The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Heptagon Capital is an investor in ASML. The author of this piece has no personal direct investment the business. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.
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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager
Photos by the author
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