The story of modern capitalism can be traced through the S&P 500: from factories to platforms to intelligence.

In the 1990s, value was built on physical assets. Oil and gas giants, automakers, and industrial conglomerates defined the index; their power rooted in factories, refineries, and infrastructure.

By the 2010s, that world had shifted to the cloud. Digital platforms, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, turned data into value. Disruptors emerged, such as Uber and Airbnb proving that scale no longer required ownership. Value creation had moved from the physical to the digital.

Now, in the 2020s, we’ve entered the era of intelligence. Today’s trillion-dollar companies, such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, are valued not just for what they produce or host, but for the intelligence they embed. Learning systems, automation, and data-driven cognition have become the new engines of growth. What once depended on assets, and later on code, now depends on intelligence, which is the new differentiator in the modern economy.

The pace of change is unprecedented. What took decades for digital is happening in just years for AI. Markets are no longer asking who is digital they are asking: who is intelligent?

The digital revolution brought data into every sector of the economy. Companies learned to measure, track, and optimize. But the next wave is different. We are no longer just digitizing information; we are creating intelligence. 

This matters because intelligence is a competitive force humanity has never faced before. In history, companies competed on capital, labor, technology, and data. Now, companies must compete against something that thinks, learns, and adapts at scale.

Across industries, Artificial Intelligence has moved from theory to practice. It’s already transforming outcomes, boosting efficiency, and creating value in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

In healthcare, AI now matches or exceeds human performance in certain diagnostics. In Sweden, an AI-supported mammography trial enabled radiologists to detect 20% more breast cancers while cutting their workload by half, a clear example of how technology can amplify human expertise.

In finance, Visa’s AI-driven fraud prevention systems helped avert $27 billion in losses in 2022, showing how automated decision-making can protect both institutions and consumers at massive scale.

In manufacturing, AI-driven models are enabling data-driven precision in production. For example, sites in the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network have reported defect-rate reductions of up to ~50 % or more, alongside improvements in productivity and cycle times.

In animal nutrition and health, AI is guiding decisions once made by instinct. Solutions like Sustell™, Verax™, and FarmTell™ transform raw farm data into predictive insights, measuring environmental footprints, anticipating animal health issues, and optimizing farm management.

Across all these fields, intelligence has become the invisible infrastructure of progress, learning, adapting, and driving the next great leap in productivity and sustainability.

These breakthroughs are not isolated. It changes how we work, how we live, compete, and govern:

• For people: If machines can decide, predict, and even create, what remains the role of human judgment?
• For societies: Intelligence will reshape economies, labor markets, and education. Whole categories of work will disappear, while new ones emerge. History reminds us from Gutenberg’s press to the Industrial Revolution to the internet that such transitions bring prosperity, but also disruption and social pain. Those who include and equip citizens to thrive alongside intelligent systems will prosper in the long run.
• For business: Intelligence is becoming the new frontier of advantage. Companies that embed AI into every process will move faster, scale more effectively, and create greater value. Organizations will increasingly behave like “living organisms”, sensing, adapting, and learning at a pace that often outstrips the very people who make them up.
• For governance and ethics: Perhaps the greatest challenges will be the concentration of decision-making in a handful of platforms, the accountability of algorithms, and the widening risk of inequality during transitions. We have seen these dilemmas play out on social networks; AI will magnify them across entire economies.

The digital age was fueled by data. The age we are entering is defined by intelligence, where organizations themselves can evolve, almost biologically, learning faster than the individuals within them. The paradox is striking: we built organizations to serve us, and eventually we must learn to keep up with them.

Europe has long been a cradle of industrial power and scientific discovery. But in the age of intelligence, the challenge is no longer invention, it is speed and scale. Unlike the U.S. with its hyperscaling platforms, or China with state-driven acceleration, Europe often advances through consensus and regulation. That brings stability, but also delay, and in AI, delay is costly.

Yet Europe has unique strengths: a vibrant startup scene, world-class universities, and global industrial champions. AI can bind these into an “innovation triangle,” where experimentation accelerates and ideas move from lab to market faster. If Europe aligns this with its values of fairness and sustainability, it can set the global standard for responsible intelligence.

The choice is stark: remain a consumer of others’ innovation, or become a shaper of intelligence.

Every economic wave has left humanity richer. The Industrial Revolution gave us productivity. The digital revolution gave us connectivity. The intelligence revolution will give us adaptability, the ability to solve the biggest challenges humanity faces at a pace never seen before.

But intelligence is different. It evolves faster than institutions or individuals can respond. It works through positive reinforcement, every use makes it smarter, faster, and harder to catch. Organizations infused with intelligence will begin to behave like “living organisms”, learning and adapting continuously. The paradox is clear: we will build them to serve us, and now we must learn to keep pace with them.

This new era of intelligence changes the game. For business, advantage will no longer come from size or scale but from how quickly intelligence can be woven into every product, process, and decision. For societies, AI holds the promise of curing diseases, accelerating decarbonization, and improving living standards, if governance can keep pace with innovation. And for people, the challenge is to focus on what machines cannot replicate: creativity, empathy, judgment, and leadership. In a world run by algorithms, our most human qualities may prove to be our greatest edge.

Markets reward the future, not the past. And the future will not just be digital, it will be intelligent.