00:00John, I want to just first, let's start off with the elephant in the room, and that is just the overall discussion that everyone's going to have about AI spending, whether that spending continues.
00:09Based on the names that you track, based on the names that you're invested in, John, you expect that spending to continue?
00:16Yeah, absolutely, Romain. Nice to be with you virtually.
00:19Yeah, so, I mean, this is an investment cycle that still, to me, seems in early innings.
00:25I will say the magnitude of revisions to spending expectations that we've seen over the last couple of quarters has been, frankly, insane.
00:36And I think we're probably entering a period where the spending is going to continue to grow, but the surprised versus expectations, I think, compresses a little bit from here.
00:46That's kind of how I'd frame my expectations for this week.
00:50There's been a lot of talk when we talk about the AI spend, John.
00:52We've seen the benefit on top-line revenue growth, but there have been a lot more questions about whether we're going to start to actually see that show up, more so on the bottom line.
01:01And I do just want to bring a headline that came to our attention right before the show, this involving Amazon, a report by Reuters saying that the company is going to cut about 10% of its corporate staff, about 30,000 workers.
01:13And we don't have a lot of details, John, on exactly why, but it gets to this question right now as to whether these companies that are splashing so much cash on all of these, I guess, AI future, if you will, John, do actually have a cost structure in place that's commensurate with it.
01:28Yeah, I mean, so I did see that headline.
01:31I haven't really dug into the story yet.
01:33Not sure exactly which workers that's impacting, whether it's actually just corporate workers or if there's warehouse workers as well.
01:40But I think Amazon's a really interesting example of a large tech company that is both distributing AI infrastructure to customers through AWS, but is also using AI to make their own operations more profitable, both on the e-commerce side in terms of what they're doing with advertising, but more interestingly, what they're doing with automation across the fulfillment center network.
02:04I think between last earnings and now they disclosed that they've got over a million robots that are now live and operational in their fulfillment center network.
02:14So I think that's just like a super interesting use case for AI that they're doing.
02:19And so I guess the short way to answer your question is, yeah, I do think that these companies that are spending the most on AI are already seeing enormous benefits, both on the revenue generation side and in the P&L and the cost side.
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