If AI feels overhyped now, Eric Schmidt suggests that businesses should brace themselves — the real disruption hasn’t even begun yet.
In an interview with Professor Graham Allison at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University on Monday, the former Google CEO pushed back on the idea that AI’s rapid growth is a speculative bubble, saying that the technology is actually under-hyped.
“If anything, it’s under-hyped because you are fundamentally automating businesses,” he said.
The real transformation, he said, is happening deep inside companies, where AI systems are beginning to take over the “boring” tasks that quietly consume billions in corporate spending.
The biggest gains, he suggested, will come from automating the backbone of corporate work: the repeatable, time-consuming processes buried deep inside every organization.
The former Google chief listed billing, accounting, product design, delivery, and inventory management as examples of this.
“There’s an awful lot there — it’s extraordinary,” he said, pointing to areas like medicine, climate solutions, and engineering as sectors where automation could accelerate breakthroughs.
Schmidt, who helped steer Google’s early investments in AI and later co-authored a book on AI with Henry Kissinger, implied the technology’s economic impact will be far larger than markets or executives appreciate.
Still, not everyone agrees with that perspective. Some economists are sounding alarm bells that the AI boom is overheated.
In an interview this week, renowned economist Ruchir Sharma said the AI surge displays all four traits of a classic bubble and could unravel if interest rates rise, while tech leaders such as Sam Altman and Bill Gates have cautioned that parts of the market resemble the dot-com era.
Far beyond coding
To illustrate how quickly AI capabilities are advancing, Schmidt described watching an AI system generate an entire software program.
“Holy crap. The end of me,” he said.
“I’ve been doing programming for 55 years. To see something start and end in front of your own life is really profound,” he added.
However, he said that AI’s long-term upside extends far beyond coding.
From back-office workflows to logistics and scientific discovery, Schmidt believes the automation curve is still in its early stages of scaling and that Wall Street is underestimating the magnitude of the shift.
“The reason people are spending this amount of money,” he said, “is to automate the boring parts of their business.”
