Jay Fontanini — You Cannot Skip the Stages

Most conversations about artificial intelligence and the executive begin with a number that refuses to move. For the better part of a decade the surveys have promised imminent transformation; for the same decade the measured return has stayed obstinately flat, and the proportion of firms capturing any material earnings impact is lower today than it was in 2019. The convenient inference is that the technology has been oversold. My guest this week draws a more demanding one.In this episode of On the Subject of Leadership, I speak with Jay Fontanini—an operator of three decades in property and casualty insurance, latterly the builder of an executive accelerator, and, by his own cheerful confession, a liberal-arts theologian who earns his living in analytics. His case is that the flat number is not a verdict but a phase: the characteristic signature of a general-purpose technology whose complementary investment has not yet been made. The complement that matters most, he argues, is not…