This piece is the second of a five-part series drawing on Juicebox Founder Joel Pember's time at SXSW London 2026.
Before you redesign your business around a technology shift, it's worth asking whether the shift is real.
I'm not being rhetorical. The markets are frenzied, the media coverage is relentless, and the history of technology investment is littered with genuinely transformative ideas that still managed to destroy capital on the way to maturity. Being right about the direction and wrong about the timing is a real way to lose.
At SXSW London, Azeem Azhar from Exponential View tackled this directly, and his method matters more than his verdict. Rather than forecast, his team reads three centuries of investment cycles, looking for the structural markers that tend to precede a crash, the way a cardiologist reads risk factors without naming the day of the heart attack. You can view a dashboard of his firm's analysis here.
Two markers carry the weight. The first is real revenue. Bubbles burst when valuations float free of paying customers, and this boom is anchored to genuine enterprise spending in a way the dotcom era never was. The second is funding quality: more than half of historic busts trace back to toxic, over-engineered financing structures, and those aren't present here; though the bears, Michael Burry among them, are hunting hard for it.
He also addressed the sharpest sceptical case: that AI firms are selling intelligence below cost to buy market share, a position that would break the moment they had to charge the true price. His counter is that serving tokens does carry a real margin, and an improving one; each new chip generation delivers more capability for the same or lower cost. The sceptic sees a business losing money on every sale. Azhar sees one that gets cheaper to run every year.
So: not a bubble in his view. But the honest answer comes with a caveat that matters as much as the verdict itself.
This is a durable, revenue-backed shift. Build for it. But don't expect the returns to arrive on your timetable.
And be prepared for multiple market corrections in the short to near term.
The businesses seeing real returns from AI right now (Azhar puts it at roughly one in five) are not the ones that added an AI tool to an existing process. They're the ones who rebuilt the process. That's a slower, harder project than buying a subscription, and it's the actual transformation work.
That's what I want to dig into next. Most businesses I speak to are doing the easier thing and telling themselves it's the harder one. Part 3 looks at what rebuilding actually means, and why the factory story from a century ago is the most useful frame we have for understanding the moment we're in right now.
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for part 3 'Why bolting AI onto your existing business is the wrong move,' dropping soon.
About SXSW London
SXSW London is the leading European platform for convergence and cross-industry collaboration, celebrating the intersection of business, technology, creativity, and culture. The 2026 edition ran from 1 to 6 June across dozens of venues, galleries, clubs, and independent spaces in Shoreditch, east London. Welcoming over 20,500 delegates from 77 countries in its inaugural year, it builds on the SXSW brand's decades of success in Austin and Sydney and its established reputation as a global platform for discovery.
About the author, Joel Pember
Joel Pember is the founder of Juicebox, a Perth-based design intelligence studio operating across Australia and Southeast Asia. Currently on sabbatical in Europe, Joel is spending time immersed in the ideas, conversations, and events shaping the next chapter of the industry. This series draws on his time at SXSW London 2026.
