AI Is Not the Internet. It’s Electricity.
By Bill Blum, Founder, Alpine Business Systems
I hear this from business owners every week:
“I feel like I’m behind on AI.”
They think they missed the boat the way some of us missed the internet boat in 1996, or the smartphone boat in 2010. They’re worried about catching up. They’re a little embarrassed about it.
I’m here to tell you — that’s the wrong analogy. And it matters that you understand why, because the wrong analogy will lead you to make the wrong decision about urgency.
The internet was optional. Electricity wasn’t.
Think back to the 1990s. The internet was new, it was clearly going somewhere, but you could ignore it for a decade and your business was mostly fine. Plenty of small businesses didn’t even get a website until 2005. They survived. Some of them are still here.
Electricity was different. Once Edison and Westinghouse wired up the country, you didn’t have ten years to think about whether you wanted in. You wired your building or you went out of business — because every competitor, customer, supplier, and employee was operating in a wired world. The factory that stuck with steam power didn’t get a slow decline. It got a fast one.
150 years later, we don’t even talk about electricity as a “technology.” We just plug things in and expect them to work.
That’s where AI is headed — and headed fast.
The worst AI you’ll ever use is the one you’re using right now.
I say this all the time. The AI you’re using today — whether it’s ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, whatever — is going to be the worst AI you ever use. Because it gets better literally every single day.
This is the part business owners struggle with. They want to wait and see. They want to let the technology mature, let the dust settle, then jump in once the picture is clear. That instinct made sense for previous technology waves. It does not make sense for this one.
It does not make sense because by the time the dust settles, the competitor down the street has been compounding their efficiency, their margin, and their decision-making for two years. You don’t catch up to that in a quarter.
The historical pattern is clear
Every major technological shift has displaced jobs and unlocked bigger ones above them.
The Luddites destroyed the looms because the looms threatened their livelihood — and they were right that those particular livelihoods were going away. They were wrong that the looms would shrink the pie. The pie got enormously bigger. So did the wages of the people who learned the new craft.
The buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when cars arrived. The assembly line replaced piecemeal craftsmanship. The transistor replaced the vacuum tube. Each wave displaced a class of work and created a bigger class of value above it.
AI is doing the same thing — only faster. ChatGPT got to 100 million users in three months. Facebook took four and a half years. The mobile phone took 16. We are not in a normal technology cycle.
So what do you actually do?
Start. This week. Here’s the simplest possible path.
1. Download Microsoft Copilot on your phone. It’s free. It uses ChatGPT’s underlying model (Microsoft licensed it for $14 billion), but Copilot doesn’t sell your data, doesn’t train on your chats, and gives you citations on every answer. Use it daily. Talk to it like you’d talk to a smart assistant. Mine sits in the bottom right corner of my home screen and I talk to it all day long.
2. Pick one small team and give them paid Copilot for Microsoft 365. Watch what they do with it across Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams. The Teams meeting summarization alone is the kind of thing you’ll wonder how you lived without.
3. Organize and secure your data before you scale. Unleashing AI on a disorganized data environment is how you accidentally expose things you shouldn’t. Security and governance come before scale, not after.
4. Put your executive team in the room with your AI team. Strategic use of this technology requires people who understand the business, not just people who understand the tools.
That’s the plan. Four steps. We’ve done this internally at Alpine — every person on our team has a Copilot license — and we’re doing it now with our clients.
One last thing — you always need a human in the mix
Copilot is called Copilot for a reason. It’s not the pilot. You and your team are still the pilots. The AI is the most capable copilot you’ve ever had, and you should treat it like one. Don’t let it fly the plane. But do let it handle the things it can handle better than you can.
The businesses that win the next five years won’t be the ones with the best AI. They’ll be the ones whose people learned to work with AI early, while everyone else was still waiting for the dust to settle.
It is the most powerful technology I’ve ever seen. It ain’t the internet. It’s electricity.
Have questions about where to start with AI at your business?
