The AI Productivity Superstorm

The Most Disruptive Change in Our Lifetime is Just Getting Started

This article is for general information only and is not personal financial advice.

If you only read one article this month, make it this one.

Seriously.

Because we are standing on the edge of potentially the biggest economic upheaval of our lifetimes, and almost nobody sees it coming.

Not the mainstream press. Not the average fund manager. Not the economists still obsessing over whether the next Fed rate cut will come in December or January.

This isn’t another ‘AI is cool' article. This is your early warning siren. The kind you might look back on in a decade and think, ‘Yep, that was the moment. That was the pivot. Why didn’t everyone else get it?'

We've felt the AI hype.

And we've heard the naysayers. ‘It's the Dotcom bubble all over again.’

Maybe it is.

But it's easy to gloss over the fact that 25 years after the Dotcom crash, tech stocks are the biggest companies in the world. They ran ahead of the story in the Dotcom bubble. But the story was still correct!

The hype cycle is not the story. The real story is that people are massively underestimating what AI is about to do for our PRODUCTIVITY.

Just as they underestimated our ability to connect and break down borders with the advent of the internet.

And in classic human fashion, because the first wave is messy and weird and full of buggy chatbots that write haikus about your tax return, the public has already started to tune out.

People are bored. They’re over it. They're complacent.

They have absolutely no idea what’s coming next.

We're going to explore a way to think about AI that makes all that hype and speculation seem conservative. This is a way to look at AI that might change your expectations of how the rest of your life could be lived.

It’s all down to one simple concept. Anyone can get it. Yet for some reason, not many people seem to be REALLY talking about it.

Of course, we may be way off course here and jumping at shadows. After all, we can’t predict the future.

But, before we get into that, we need to lay the groundwork with some concepts that underpin this whole thing.It’s peak Electric Vehicle (EV) pessimism time.

The Conventional Wisdom of GDP Growth

Before we talk about how AI is about to tear the old rulebook apart, we need to understand how the system works today. GDP growth isn’t some mystical force.

It’s a simple equation with two major components, and the entire framework of modern economics has been built around them.

At its core, every economy grows because of two levers:

• Population growth

• Productivity growth

Population growth expands the number of workers who can produce things. Productivity growth expands the amount each worker can produce. That’s it. Every macroeconomic model you’ve ever heard of is just these two ideas, dressed up in different mathematical outfits.

But there’s a subtlety here that matters.

The Demand-Side GDP Growth

Demand-side economists argue that GDP rises when people spend more. More consumption. More investment. More government expenditure. More exports. Pump the demand and output rises.

It's the pull effect.

It’s useful for short-term analysis. Recessions, stimulus packages, interest rate tweaks, energy shocks, inventory cycles. Demand-side explanations are great at telling us why GDP jumped last quarter or dipped during a global panic.

But they fall apart over long horizons.

Why? Because long-term demand is basically unlimited.

Humans always want more stuff. Better stuff. Faster stuff. Fancier stuff. Even if our income doubled tomorrow, we’d find a way to spend it. That means, for long-run growth, demand is never the constraint.

Which leaves us with the real driver.

The Supply-Side GDP Growth

Supply-side economics looks at the productive capacity of the economy. How many workers exist. How good they are. What tools they have. What technology they use. How much capital is available. How efficient their workflows are.

From this lens, long-term GDP growth comes from two things:

• More workers entering the system (population growth)

• More output per worker (productivity)

Productivity is the ultimate source of sustained economic expansion.

For the last 150 years, nations have balanced both levers to create steady, predictable GDP growth. More people. Better technology. Incremental efficiency. Linear improvements.

And economists have spent decades analysing tiny variations in these inputs, treating growth like a delicate machine that needs tuning.

But here’s what’s at risk of getting vaporised.

For the first time in human history, the population lever could become irrelevant for white collar work.

We’re heading into a world where you get population growth without actual humans. A labour force that scales with compute rather than childbirth. A worker base that multiplies itself endlessly.

AI flips the entire framework. Instead of 10 million human workers supporting an economy, you get 10 million workers plus hundreds of millions of AI agents operating beside them.

This isn’t a 10 percent bump. It’s not 50 percent. In some industries, it won’t even look like 100 percent.

We are talking about 1,000 percent productivity leaps or even more.

This is what happens when productive capacity becomes uncapped.

Let’s just stress again, that this is possibility we see a strong chance of playing out, but no one can know for sure. Certainly the magnitude of such an impact is near impossible to predict.

We’re talking about an economic superstorm.

The Rise of the Invisible Workforce

Think about your job, your inbox, your calendar, your admin load.

Now imagine you were suddenly handed ten full time employees. But instead of costing you $80k a year each, they cost you $80 a month.

And they never stop.

They never need sleep. They never get sick. They never get bored. They don’t quit. They don’t unionise. They don’t send passive aggressive emails about workloads.

That’s what the Cognitive Autonomy Productivity Shift (CAPS) looks like.

It’s the phase where AI tools boost our productivity exponentially. Where output per human is bound only by the Cognitive Autonomy Multiplier (CAM). Or in simple terms, how many humans worth of productivity one person can generate with the aid of AI.

This Cognitive Autonomy Multiplier will increase over time as AI gets more efficient and requires less and less clarification of instructions and creates fewer mistakes.

The theoretical end goal is Total Economic Autonomy (TEA). That’s the stage where robots and AI are self directed for maximum productivity and do not require human oversight.

Here’s a taste of what this invisible workforce will do for every information worker in the CAPS phase:

• Email triage and response. Not just 'suggested replies'. Fully automated classification, escalation, drafting, sending, follow up chains, and resolution.

• Calendar and priority orchestration. Your AI knows what matters, who matters, and how much each task is worth. It protects your time like a rabid bodyguard.

• Marketing, outreach, and networking. The biggest hidden labour cost in modern work. Soon delegated to specialised AI agents running thousands of micro campaigns in parallel.

• Data analysis and trend hunting. The thing humans pretend to be good at but are actually terrible at. AI will scan oceans of data for patterns and spit out insights before you’ve even decided which spreadsheet to open.

• Client onboarding, updates, and relationship maintenance. Every touchpoint. Every reminder. Every follow up. Every check in. Automated, personalised, relentless.

• Research and synthesis at a superhuman scale. Ten thousand pages of dense material converted into a single page brief in minutes.

This is not science fiction. Early versions exist today. What’s missing is orchestration, integration, and reliability. But the direction of travel is clear.

The moment agents become stable, chainable, and modular, you will effectively have an army of digital staff working behind every human employee.

One worker becomes ten. Ten become a hundred. A hundred become a thousand.

This is the multiplier effect nobody is modelling yet.

The Exponential Zone: Where Productivity Goes Vertical

The economy doesn’t move in smooth lines. It jumps. It surges. It hits tipping points.

And AI agents are the tipping point for productivity.

Just like the internet boom. Just like the advent of electricity, the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution etc.

AI doesn’t just improve one industry at a time. It improves every information based workflow simultaneously. That hits law, accounting, banking, finance, healthcare, advertising, consulting, education, media, government, logistics coordination, defence intelligence, software development, cybersecurity, engineering design, architecture...

And that’s only the white collar side.

Because once you combine AI with robotics, this explosion jumps into the physical economy.

Suddenly you get autonomous construction, automated warehouse operations, robotic mining fleets, AI-managed supply chains, self-maintaining energy networks, robotic farming systems...

Soon we could have generalist robots in every household helping with every chore. From dusting the blinds, to painting the front fence and fixing the leak in the roof.

The moment AI and robotics merge, labour costs become a choice. Marginal cost approaches zero. Productivity becomes uncapped. Entire industries can scale without hiring a single additional human.

That’s why the 'AI hype is over' crowd has completely missed the point. They’re measuring the wrong thing. They’re looking at the current capabilities, not the trajectory. They see a tool. They don’t see a workforce.

This isn’t ChatGPT writing consultant reports for government agencies. This is the economic structure of the world about to be ripped open, rewired, and rebuilt.

A World Beyond Human Productivity

Let’s push this further.

When you remove the constraints of human labour, GDP itself becomes a philosophical question. Because the metric assumes humans produce the output. If AI systems generate most of the value, what exactly are we measuring?

Some countries could experience GDP growth rates that economists today would call impossible.

What happens if a nation’s effective labour force doubles? Then doubles again? Then doubles again? Without adding a single person to the population?

What happens when a company with 200 employees suddenly operates with the output of 20,000?

What happens when a two-person startup competes against a Fortune 500 company because both have equal access to infinite AI workers?

We’re moving into a world where economic scale becomes decoupled from headcount.

That has second and third order effects that most governments haven’t even thought about, from labour laws to welfare models, education systems, monetary policy and of course taxation.

All built on assumptions about human productivity that will no longer be true.

We’ve never had a boom where the primary driver wasn’t more humans, but more compute.

That is an economic mutation.

Why the Market Isn’t Pricing This

Markets price narratives long before they price fundamentals. Right now, the narrative is simple.

‘AI is interesting. It’s useful. It helps productivity. But it’s probably overhyped'

That story is safe. It keeps analysts sounding cautious. It doesn’t require big leaps. And it fits the human bias towards linear thinking.

But exponential systems don’t start exponential. They start clumsy, unstable, and deceptively unimpressive. Then they mature. They specialise. They coordinate. They self improve.

AI agents could become the organising layer for the global knowledge economy.

The big money will position early. Everyone else will realise too late.

The ASX Names Positioned for the AI Wave

There's still plenty of hype in the AI space that will turn into nothing. There are plenty of companies getting TOO MUCH attention. With every investing thematic, the key is to separate the wannabes from the real contenders.

There are genuine, high quality ASX names positioned to ride the thematic as agents go mainstream and AI productivity becomes the organising force of the economy.

A few ASX names worth keeping on your radar:

NextDC (ASX:NXT)

Australia’s data centre titan. The more AI workloads, the more compute. The more compute, the more NXT expands.

Nuix (ASX:NXL)

Controversial history, but relevant tech. Nuix specialises in data processing, investigation, and unstructured-data indexing. Large-scale AI workflows depend on clean, searchable data.

Megaport (ASX:MP1)

A crucial connectivity layer enabling flexible, high-bandwidth connections between cloud providers. As AI training expands, interconnect demand explodes.

Infomedia (ASX:IFM)

Specialises in automotive data, digital parts catalogues, and service platforms. As AI optimises supply chains and repair workflows, IFM’s data becomes a bottleneck point of value.

Openlearning (ASX:OLL)

Openlearning provides an AI-powered SaaS platform for education providers to host and refine online course delivery. The company stands out as one of the early adopters of generative AI for content creation in the academic space.

Check out Vitti Capital’s interview with Openlearning CEO Adam Brimo here.

Infratil (ASX:IFT)

A powerhouse infrastructure investor with major exposure to data centres through its stakes in CDC Data Centres, one of the fastest growing hyperscale operators in Australasia. A pure, high-quality way to play the AI infrastructure boom with long-term contracted earnings and massive expansion pipelines.

The Edge

Spotting mispriced growth opportunities is what we're all about at The Markets IQ.

But here’s the real edge, the part most investors will ignore until it’s too late:

AI isn’t just a trend. It’s a regime shift.

It could reshape productivity, rewire labour markets, distort valuations, crush old business models, and create fortunes for the people who understand it before the rest of the world catches up.

Most investors are still analysing the last cycle. The edge comes from preparing for the next one.

Because when productivity goes vertical, the winners won’t be the biggest companies…

They’ll be the fastest learners. The earliest adopters. The investors who can see the exponential curve before it becomes obvious.

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This publication has been prepared by The Markets IQ, a division of Vitti Capital Pty Ltd (ABN 13 670 030 145), which is a Corporate Authorised Representative (001306367) of Point Capital Group Pty Ltd (ABN 41 625 931 900), the holder of Australian Financial Services Licence 518031. This report is for general information only and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. It is not personal financial advice or a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. You should consider whether the information is appropriate in light of your circumstances and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. This report is intended solely for wholesale, sophisticated, or professional investors within the meaning of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth).

Any views, probabilities, valuations, technical levels, or forecasts expressed are strictly the opinions of the authors as at the date of publication, based on publicly available information and assumptions which may change without notice. They are illustrative only and not predictive of future outcomes. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.