MPS BRIEF · SEPTEMBER 2026
AI capability, AI-company valuation and an operating company’s ability to capture value are three different questions. Treating them as one is where bad decisions begin.
By David Morris
4 MIN READ
I believe deeply in AI.
I also don’t believe every dollar chasing it is going to earn a return.
On Monday, AI-linked stocks sold off after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei — and then Sam Altman and Elon Musk — said the industry needs to slow the pace of frontier development.
That wasn’t the market’s only problem. Oil was up. Bond yields were up. Rate expectations were changing.
Still, the reaction felt telling. We’ve spent the last few years treating three very different questions as if they were the same.
THREE DIFFERENT QUESTIONS
A capability question. Answered by using the tools, not by reading about them.
A pricing question. It moves on sentiment, rates and supply of capital — not on what the models can do for you.
An operating question. It is decided inside your workflows, your data and your decisions.
I don’t have a clean answer to all three. I don’t think anyone does.
But I’ve used these tools enough now to know this: even if the models didn’t improve much from here, there is already more than enough capability to change how a lot of companies work.
AI shortened research, prepared decision briefs, flagged pipeline risk and took hours out of recurring executive work. Nothing exotic — the same tasks every week, done to a defined standard, with someone reviewing the output.
Companies bought the tools and changed almost nothing else. No outcome named, no workflow redesigned, no owner. The license renews. The operating model is identical.
That’s the gap I keep coming back to.
The technology really can be extraordinary. That doesn’t mean every investment assumption around it makes sense.
At MPS, we start with the outcome someone wants to improve, then work backward. Five questions, in this order:
And then the one that settles the argument: how will we know it actually worked?
That part is less exciting than a new model release, but it’s where the value actually shows up.
If AI didn’t get materially better from here, what could your company still change with what already exists?
Market price, model capability and operating adoption are three different questions. Treating them as one is where bad decisions begin. If you have a view — including the view that the whole category is overbuilt — tell us where you land.
Selective by design.
SOURCES
Reuters, September 14 — AI-linked stocks fell after leading AI executives called for slowing frontier development, while rising oil prices and rate expectations added pressure.
reuters.com/business/ai-warnings-knock-nasdaq-futures-pressure-tech-stocks-2026-09-14A study covering more than 1,500 organizations and 17 million ChatGPT Enterprise messages found wide differences in adoption and concluded that firms are still actively learning how to integrate AI into organizational workflows.
arxiv.org/abs/2608.12236AUTHOR
David Morris
Twenty questions, about three minutes, and a 0–100 readiness score with the three things to fix first.