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Over the last few years, artificial intelligence has gone from niche curiosity to global headline. Capital has flooded into the space. Corporate strategies, board decks, and startup pitches have all wrapped themselves around AI as the growth story.
And if you look at where private investment has been going, it’s clear: we’ve been living through an AI super-cycle.
But as with every major technology wave, there’s a difference between hype-driven speculation and real, durable value. At Big Room Tech, we work with companies who are trying to build the latter — and it’s increasingly obvious that we are moving toward the next phase of this cycle.
Not the end of AI.
But the end of AI as a magical, undefined growth story.
Over the last two years, we’ve seen:
Some of this has produced meaningful results. A lot of it hasn’t.
Many organisations are discovering that:
In other words: AI is not a cheat code. It’s a powerful technology that still has to sit inside real business models, real operational constraints, and real customer needs.
As model performance gains begin to flatten and the gap between expectation and reality becomes visible, some parts of the market will inevitably re-rate. That’s normal. It’s what happens when a technology moves from myth to infrastructure.
Whenever one wave matures, another narrative quickly emerges.
Right now, that candidate is quantum computing. It’s an exciting field with genuine long-term potential in very specific problem spaces: complex optimisation, cryptography, certain types of scientific simulation, and so on.
But we’re already seeing early signs of a familiar pattern:
At Big Room Tech, we’re optimistic about deep tech — but we’re also pragmatic.
Quantum computing is still early, specialised, and heavily constrained. It may transform certain sectors over time, but it won’t magically fix the underlying issues that many AI programmes are facing today: unclear use cases, weak integration, unrealistic timelines, and a mismatch between promises and actual value.
Chasing the next acronym or wave doesn’t compensate for the absence of:
Whatever the next hype cycle looks like, the fundamentals remain the same.
So if AI is moving past the “everything is possible” phase, and quantum (or whatever comes next) is still a long way from broad commercial deployment, what should leadership teams do now?
AI is not going away. It will increasingly be baked into:
The question is not “Is AI over?” It’s:
“Where does AI genuinely create leverage in our business, and how do we build capability around that?”
That means focusing on specific problems and clear outcomes rather than chasing generic “AI transformation”.
Instead of asking, “How do we keep up with the next big narrative?”, ask:
The companies that come out ahead will be the ones that quietly build robust, AI-enhanced workflows and products, not necessarily the ones shouting loudest about model sizes.
One of the big lessons from the last decade of tech cycles is that rigid narratives age badly.
If your entire value proposition is anchored to a single buzzword, you will need to rebrand every time the market mood changes.
Instead:
This is exactly the kind of flexible brand and product architecture we encourage clients to build — it’s cheaper and less painful to adjust over time than to rebuild every few years.
Hype cycles tend to fixate on front-stage announcements: new models, new breakthroughs, big demo moments.
But real, sustainable change happens in the infrastructure layer:
If you want to understand where a technology truly is on its maturity curve, look at how boring it has become. The more it quietly powers real systems in the background, the less you need the hype.
At Big Room Tech, we’re not anti-AI, anti-quantum, or anti-hype. Hype serves a purpose: it mobilises capital, talent, and attention. Many important technologies would never have been funded if everyone had been purely rational.
But our job is to help companies navigate through hype, not be driven by it.
Our work with clients focuses on:
We care less about whether we’re in an “AI bubble” or a “quantum bubble” and more about whether our clients are:
Every time a hype cycle cools, something interesting happens: the noise drops, and the builders who were focused on fundamentals are still standing.
They have:
Meanwhile, capital becomes more discerning, talent becomes more focused, and the market starts rewarding genuine value over theatrics.
That’s the phase we’re interested in.
AI will mature. Quantum and other deep technologies will progress at their own pace. There will be more cycles, more narratives, more “next big things”.
But if you build with discipline — clear strategy, adaptable positioning, and a focus on real outcomes — you don’t need to predict every bubble. You just need to avoid betting your entire future on one.
And that’s where we like to sit: quietly helping teams build technology businesses that outlast the hype.
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