In this Fifth Industrial Revolution:
The Future of AI Isn’t ChatGPT. Or Even Claude.
In this Fifth Industrial Revolution:
The Future of AI Isn’t ChatGPT. Or Even Claude.
It’s Owned Intelligence. And…Why this matters for every business you know.
Let me tell you something that should worry you. Not about robots taking your job. Not about some dystopian AI future. But about right now.
Everyone is using AI. Almost no one is getting real value from it.
I’ve spent years talking about the Fifth Industrial Revolution on stages across the UK, on BBC Breakfast, on Radio 5 Live and beyond. I wrote the book on it — literally. And what I keep seeing, in boardrooms and breakout sessions alike, is the same pattern.
Businesses are buying licences. Running pilots. Encouraging “experimentation.” But they are not changing how decisions get made.
And the data backs me up. PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey — 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries — found that 56% have seen no significant revenue increase or cost reduction from AI in the past year. More than half. Nothing to show for it.
As I always say in my keynotes:
“With the right people and the right technology, you can take over the world. Without them, that world takes over you.” (Dan Sodergren 2015)
“With the right people and the right technology, you can take over the world. Without them, that world takes over you.” (Dan Sodergren 2015)
I said that back in 2015. It’s never been more true. We are living through the fastest technology adoption in history. And one of the weakest returns on investment.
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a thinking problem.
The Melbourne/KPMG global study of 48,000 people found that 66% are now using AI regularly. But only 46% actually trust it. And 57% rely on AI outputs without even checking if they’re accurate.
Meanwhile, WalkMe found that 78% of employees are using AI tools their employer hasn’t approved. Shadow AI. Invisible. Unmanaged. Building no organisational intelligence whatsoever.
In my keynotes I talk about AI as your Automated Intern. You wouldn’t give your most critical, client-facing work to an intern without supervision, would you? The same goes for AI. It’s powerful. But it needs guidance, structure, and — crucially — it needs to be part of how your organisation thinks. Not just how it types.
If your employees are hiding AI use, your strategy has already failed.
The disruption is already here. And it’s brutal. I’ve been warning about this for years. Not the Terminator version of AI. The subtler, scarier version.
The version that makes your core product effectively free overnight.
Look at Chegg. A $14.5 billion edtech company. A market leader. Profitable and growing. Then ChatGPT arrived. And their product — paid academic answers — became essentially free. Revenue fell 30% year-on-year. Then 49%. Over 600 jobs gone in six months. Market cap collapsed from $14.5 billion to around $100 million. The NYSE has issued a delisting warning.
That’s a 99% destruction of shareholder value in under four years.
This is The Fifth Industrial Revolution in action. And it doesn’t knock. It doesn’t give you time to run a pilot.
AI doesn’t improve markets. It deletes them.
So I decided to test something. On something I know well
. I talk a lot on stage about the difference between rented intelligence and owned intelligence.
Rented: you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. You get answers. Fine for some things.
Owned: AI that thinks the way your business thinks. Trained on your data. Structured around your decisions. That’s where the real value lives.
So I tested a system built on that principle. MatrixStrike — a specialised intelligence tool built by Martin Lucas and his team at Gap in the Matrix. Martin is a behavioural scientist working on what he calls Decision Physics: deterministic AI that produces reproducible, auditable outputs rather than probabilistic guesswork.
I didn’t test it on something easy.
I tested it on AgriTech.
I’m speaking in June on the future of AgriTech, AI, and the Fifth Industrial Revolution. It’s a complex, global space — climate risk, competing regulations across the EU, India, and Brazil, and a funding correction that has wiped 40–50% of sector investment since 2021. It’s exactly the kind of space where a generalist AI would give you confident-sounding nonsense.
I expected decent output.
What I got was something else. Not answers. Thinking.
Within minutes, it produced:
• A full executive summary with a clear “Hold” investment position and the reasoning behind it
• Market analysis across geographies, separating large-scale commercial agriculture from smallholder markets
• Regulatory insight — including the EU Data Act’s structural threat to platforms built on aggregating farmer data
• A risk model with likelihood and impact scoring across ten named risks
• A 30/60/90 day execution plan with named triggers and KPIs
• A capital allocation strategy with defined release conditions
Consultancy-grade thinking. The kind of work that would normally take a specialist team weeks and cost tens of thousands.
And here’s the bit that really got me.
It wasn’t just impressive. It was mostly right. It challenged assumptions. It named real failure cases that even experienced AgriTech investors miss — the collapse of FBN’s direct input model, the retreat of precision agriculture platforms from Sub-Saharan Africa after connectivity failures, the John Deere data ownership backlash.
It even pushed back on AI hype in agriculture itself. Pointing out that AI crop advisory tools hit 85–95% accuracy in controlled trials but drop to 60–70% in real field conditions. That’s why farmers try AI tools for one season and walk away.
All of this. For £499. That’s when it clicked.
This is what the Fifth Industrial Revolution actually looks like. In my book — The New Intelligence: The Fifth Industrial Revolution — I talk about four intelligences that will define this era:
• Artificial Intelligence — the tools and systems we build
• Emotional Intelligence — how we lead people through the change
• Independent Intelligence — how individuals adapt and thrive
• Organisational Intelligence — how companies transform, not just experiment
What I saw in that MatrixStrike AgriTech report was all four intelligences working together. A specialised AI system, guided by human judgement, delivering structured intelligence that organisations can actually act on.
That’s not AI as a tool. That’s AI as organisational intelligence.
And Gartner agrees. By the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents — up from less than 5% just twelve months ago. Not general-purpose AI. Specialist systems built for specific decisions.
The market is already moving in the direction I’ve been pointing to from stages for years.
The question isn’t which AI tool to use. It’s what intelligence you own.
I ask this in every workshop. And I’m asking you now.
You wouldn’t rent your entire IT system.
So why are you renting your intelligence?
The organisations winning in The Fifth Industrial Revolution aren’t the ones with the most AI subscriptions. They’re the ones building AI that thinks the way their business thinks. Trained on their data. Structured around their decisions. Owned, not rented.
The same shift is happening across every sector:
• Marketing strategy
• Financial planning and risk
• Operations and supply chain
• Leadership decision-making at every level
Everywhere that structured thinking matters. Which is everywhere.
But let’s be honest. Most businesses aren’t ready.
I say this with love, not judgment. I’ve worked with many, many different organisations on talks about AI strategy. I know how hard this is.
The tools are getting extraordinary. But they still depend on:
• Good data — clean, structured, relevant
• Clear context — what problem are you actually solving?
• Human judgement — still irreplaceable, still essential
This isn’t magic. A brilliant tool with bad context still produces rubbish. As I tell every audience — AI is your Automated Intern. A brilliant one. But still an intern. It needs briefing, checking, and developing.
DSIT’s 2026 AI Adoption Research found that 80% of UK businesses cite ethical concerns as a major adoption barrier, and 76% point to high costs. That’s not fear of the future. That’s reasonable caution in the present.
But “not ready” is not the same as “don’t start.”
As Abraham Lincoln is often quoted to have said:
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”
We have to sharpen our axes. Now.
The Fifth Industrial Revolution is here.
Not coming. Here. Steam powered the first revolution. Electricity lit the second. Computing accelerated the third. Networks connected us for the fourth.
The Fifth Industrial Revolution is about New Intelligence. Not AI in isolation. But Artificial Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Independent Intelligence, and Organisational Intelligence working together.
The winners won’t be the ones who use AI the most.
They’ll be the ones who:
Structure it properly
Apply it to real decisions
Build systems around it rather than just experiments on top of it
Because this isn’t about better prompts.
It’s about better thinking.
And once thinking is scalable… everything else changes.
The question becomes
Will you be an active participant in the Fifth Industrial Revolution, or a passive observer?
The question becomes
Will you be an active participant in the Fifth Industrial Revolution, or a passive observer?
If not now, when?
About The Author: Dan Sodergren
Keynote speaker, BBC technology expert, two-time TEDx speaker, and author of The New Intelligence: The Fifth Industrial Revolution. He speaks to HR directors, Chief People Officers, and senior leaders at mid-to-large organisations across the UK and beyond.
Find out more: thefifthindustrialrevolution.co.uk | dansodergren.com
References
University of Melbourne & KPMG (2025) — Trust, attitudes and use of AI
WalkMe (2025) — AI in the Workplace Survey
PwC 29th Global CEO Survey (2026)
Chegg investor relations / SEC filings (2025–2026)
Gartner (August 2025) — AI agents forecast
DSIT UK AI Adoption Research (2026)
MatrixStrike / Gap in the Matrix
The New Intelligence: The Fifth Industrial Revolution (Dan Sodergren)