AGITA is the new FOMO
You might have AGI-Triggered Anxiety. Read on.
Two weeks ago I sat in a board meeting where an 8-figure AI commitment was approved in under 20 minutes. The CFO asked one question, about the payment schedule. No one really asked for details about what the money was for.
Afterward, the chief strategy officer walked me to the elevator and said the thing people often say to me in hallways, away from their peers: “I know, I know… but we had to do something.”
I’ve heard a version of that sentence many, many, many(!) times.
For most of the past decade, AI decisions have been made using two guiding principles: fear and FOMO, the fear of missing out. Fear resulted in paralysis masquerading as “good governance” — lots of meetings, with no decision made. Meanwhile, FOMO was stupidly fast action, without any deep analysis or long-term strategy contemplated in advance.
Lately, I’m observing a third guiding principle, and it’s definitely worse.
I call it AGITA: AGI-Triggered Anxiety.
It seems like every partner in the Valley has it. From my perspective, it’s the only thing that explains a $300 million seed round for a company with nothing more than a landing page and a manifesto.
AGITA isn’t entirely irrational
The easy version of this argument is that everyone has lost their minds when it comes to AI, so the spending is stupid. That’s not what I’m saying. Some of this capital will be spectacularly well placed.
But, but, but… the problem is structural. Fear and FOMO were at least tethered to something observable. Fear pointed at a specific downside, like a regulator action, a potential data breach, or the probability of a lawsuit. FOMO was about a competitor’s launch, or a customer who might defect, or a deal from OpenAI or Anthropic that seemed so good it felt irresponsible to turn it down. In any of those cases, right or wrong, you’d see the impact of your (in)decisions.
AGITA, however, is connected to a timeline no one can defend, against a definition that changes depending on which company or lab you ask.
Unrelenting heartburn
As of now, a thesis for AGI — investment, product, process, etc. — isn’t clearly defined, so decisions can’t really be evaluated. Without a product, let alone a profit, there’s no true failure condition. For f’s sake, we don’t even have an agreed-upon true definition of AGI nor an alignment on specific benchmarks proving definitively it exists.
When a decision is made without strategic foresight — a structural forces check, a value migration map, value network diligence, partnership roadmaps, trade-off ledgers, future capability/ use case blueprints, capital alignment frameworks, scenarios and the like — the outcome tends not to go as planned. Which is why, 18-24 months later, there’s hell to pay in the boardroom. The defense is usually something like “we’re building capacity” or “we’re learning.” You can always claim to have learned something. But this often means the spending can’t be evaluated easily, which means it can’t be stopped, which means the only available direction is more.
The problem with AGITA is that there’s no Tums for frontier models.
The AI boom has resulted in a boomerang effect, with a clear beneficiary. The vendors and labs causing your AGITA have no incentive to help you specify the future you’re hedging against, because the moment it gets specified, it becomes a thing you can measure them against.
This has happened before
In 1982, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry launched the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, which was a national, decade-long push to build machines that could reason. The response in the West was panic. This correlated with a sudden auto market dominated by fuel-efficient Japanese cars and a growing fear of Japanese business culture, so a number of big government initiatives were launched.
As the promise of AI seemed more imminent, the US launched the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin as the US’s first major for-profit tech research consortium. The UK and Europe launched similar defensive efforts, Alvey Programme and ESPRIT. Enormous amounts of capital moved, quickly, driven almost entirely by the fear of being structurally left behind in a technology (AI) whose end state nobody could describe.
The Fifth Generation project ended in 1992 having produced interesting research and basically none of the machines it promised. The counter-programs it triggered mostly dissolved. What almost nobody did during that decade was write down, in advance, what would have to be true for the panic to have been justified. They didn’t bother with strategic foresight.
Meds for this moment
I’m not going to tell you to spend less. I don’t know your business, and under soul-crushing deep uncertainty, aggressive allocation is sometimes the right move.
But I would want you to do a simple strategic foresight exercise first. (Obviously, this alone isn’t sufficient, but it’s better than allowing AGITA to dictate your investment.)
Answer these questions in detail:
What must be true in 12 months/ 3 years/ 5 years/ 10 years for this to work?
What would have to happen for us to conclude it isn’t working?
When and how will we evaluate?
You’ll may need to challenge your cherished beliefs, which may be uncomfortable. Better one tough day, than a really bad year.
I would also add 'in the absence of external pressures like stock price' and FOMO, would the proposal on the deck still fly? - because it should still make sense in the cold light of day if you are doing things right, and not because it has the letters A and I associated with it.