AI Disruption Has Plenty of Opinions. Now It Has a Prediction Market.

Everyone’s heard the Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn’t bark. The one where a champion racehorse disappears and its trainer turns up dead. Everyone’s poking around the crime scene trying to find a clue to solve the mystery. Holmes eventually does by focusing on what didn’t happen. As in the stable dog that never barked. It was the clue that cracked the case.

One might say that AI has a lot of dogs that aren’t barking, too.

There’s the doctor’s appointment that never gets booked because a chatbot answers the question at 11 p.m. The support ticket that never gets opened. The junior analyst who never gets hired because three people can now do what took five. The software subscription that was never going to renew because the work moved somewhere else.

None of those decisions leaves an immediate paper trail or a receipt, so to speak. But every one of them says something important about what AI is doing to the economy.

That’s what makes measuring a little AI tricky. Everyone can see the money pouring in. Chips. Data centers. Models. Talent. What’s much harder to see is what comes out the other side. What changed, what disappeared, what got faster and what became unnecessary.

Starting in September, people will be able to trade on what’s otherwise been so very hard to put a price tag on.

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