AI moves in dog years. A strategy has a half-life. This 26-page paper shows how fast the clocks are running, what that does to five-year plans, company data, and board oversight, and how leaders can respond.
Sources are named, and estimates are labeled as estimates.
How much faster key AI technologies change than mature industries, with the evidence behind the range and up to about 20× on some measures.
How much faster an image model trained to the same accuracy, from 10 days to 2 minutes 43 seconds in 19 months, and why the transformer matters.
How fast the cost of a fixed level of AI performance has been falling, and what that does to a five-year payback.
What a 10-million-token context window can hold, and why AI memory is a capability, a design choice, and a risk.
How long three 2026 incidents took to move AI agents from human-run to self-directed, and what a board should ask.
How the average stay in the S&P 500 shortened between 1958 and 2012, and why Kodak and Blockbuster had more warning than you do.
Four of the 26 pages. The rest is in the full paper.
Jon Nordmark is Co-Founder and CEO of Iterate.ai, a private AI software infrastructure company, and co-founded eBags.
Earlier in his career he was a product manager at Samsonite, where product development took about 18 months and he updated three-year plans for about 1,000 products every quarter. eBags, his first startup, which he co-founded in 1998, had to change marketing plans every six months as it worked its way to selling 29 million pieces of luggage. Today his company, Iterate.ai, works in weeks. That gap is the subject of this paper.
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CEOs, board members, CIOs, and strategy and finance leaders who make multi-year commitments in a market that changes in months.
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