Act I of artificial intelligence was infrastructure. Chips. Clusters. Data centers. The winners were obvious because the product was a machine you could photograph.

Act II is not a machine. It is a disappearance. Companies are no longer asking whether to “add AI.” They are asking which layers of software they can stop paying for once an agent can write the page, pick the audience, send the message, buy the media, and read the result from a single room.

McKinsey still describes most organizations as early in that journey. In 2025, 88 percent of companies said they used AI somewhere. Almost none had scaled it into the way work actually happens. Employees are ready. The stack is not.