While these prognostications may prove true, today's businesses are finding major hurdles when they seek to graduate from pilots and experiments to enterprise-wide AI deployment. Just 5.4% of US businesses, for example, were using AI to produce a product or service in 2024. Moving from initial forays into AI use, such as code generation and customer service, to firm-wide integration depends on strategic and organizational transitions in infrastructure, data governance, and supplier ecosystems. As well, organizations must weigh uncertainties about developments in AI performance and how to measure return on investment. If organizations seek to scale AI across the business in coming years, however, now is the time to act.

Shares in Meta slumped 15% when Wall Street opened on Thursday, wiping about 190bn off the value of the Facebook and Instagram parent company, as investors reacted to a pledge to ramp up spending on artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, said on a conference call on Wednesday that spending on the technology would have to grow "meaningfully" before the company could make "much revenue" from new AI products. Shares in Meta had been boosted in 2023 by Zuckerberg's tough action on costs in what he described as a "year of efficiency". A relaxation of that restraint has rattled investors after Meta raised the upper bound of its capital expenditure guidance on Wednesday, from 37bn to 40bn. Last week, Meta released Llama 3, the latest version of its AI model, alongside an image generator that updates pictures in real time while users type prompts.

Despite the longest growth run in nearly three decades, Japan's economic outlook remains far from robust as uncertainty abounds over wage growth and business investment. Under Abenomics, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's program of radical monetary easing, fiscal spending and vows of structural reforms, the economy grew at an annualized rate of 0.5 percent in the October-December period, marking the eighth straight quarter of expansion. It slowed from a revised 2.2 percent increase in the previous quarter and was below the potential growth rate of around 1.0 percent. Many economists expect the economy to keep growing at a moderate pace this year, but the biggest wild card could be volatility in financial markets after the recent global stock market rout. The key question now is whether domestic demand -- private consumption and corporate spending -- can pick up further and help the world's third-largest economy sustain its recent growth momentum, economists said.