That distinction matters more than whether he’s right.

AI has advanced faster than almost anyone expected. Recent geopolitical shocks have compounded the uncertainty. But the real question isn’t who wins or loses in Karp’s vision — it’s whether that vision is the one we want to build.

Disruption Isn’t the Same as Progress

The AI era has generated extraordinary wealth. Nvidia and Microsoft are each worth trillions. ChatGPT now reaches 900 million weekly users. By conventional measures, the revolution is working.

But U.S. unemployment hit a four-year high last November. The wealth gap between the top 1% and bottom 50% has widened since ChatGPT launched. Rapid advancement and record market performance are not measures of success — they’re measures of speed.

A technology capable of unprecedented scientific discovery and work automation should do more than reshuffle economic winners. It hasn’t, largely because industry and government have failed to define what outcomes they actually want AI to deliver — or who it should serve.

Trust Is the Missing Ingredient

People adopted the smartphone because they could see how it would improve their lives. Nobody adopts a technology framed as replacing them.

Yet that’s exactly how some of AI’s loudest advocates describe it. The result is predictable: wariness, skepticism, and a widening gap between immense capability and actual value.

For AI to endure — commercially and socially — people need to trust it. That requires them to feel its benefits directly.

Where AI Should Actually Go to Work

If AI is eliminating manual labor, the economically and socially prudent move is to direct that capacity toward the sectors most starved of it: healthcare, human services, and infrastructure.

These industries face acute labor shortages and stretched staff. They’re also where automating manual tasks would be most transformative without displacing workers:

• Doctors spending more time diagnosing and treating patients instead of documenting visits
• Caseworkers staying in their roles because their jobs no longer consume their weekends
• Transit systems running more reliably as maintenance and reporting become automated

That’s not disruption. That’s progress.

Build With Workers, Not For Them

The US leads in AI talent, research, and infrastructure. The challenge isn’t building the technology — it’s pointing it at the right problems.

One meaningful shift since ChatGPT’s launch: the skills threshold to harness AI has dropped dramatically. LLMs, vibe-coding, and accessible tools mean that building and tailoring technology is no longer reserved for elite college graduates. Frontline workers — the ones who actually understand what’s broken in healthcare or social services — are no longer locked out.

A software engineer knows nothing about being a doctor or a caseworker. If AI is going to serve our most critical workers, industry must build it with them, not for them. Government procurement must do the same. That’s how you get both value and trust.

Stop Predicting. Start Deciding.

Karp is right that AI will reshape economic power. Where he’s wrong is treating that reshaping as inevitable rather than engineered.

The problems most in need of solving aren’t hidden. We know where inequality lives. We know which services are buckling. If the leaders building this technology want it to last, they should stop predicting who gets left behind — and start deciding who gets lifted up.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia (NVDA +1.80%), has been talking a lot about agentic artificial intelligence (AI) in recent weeks.

He’s right to do so, as agentic AI represents the next leap in AI technology.

No matter how advanced modern AI programs might seem when you interact with them, the way they function is, in essence, identical to how an ordinary computer program does.

You input a prompt, and the AI outputs an answer to that prompt. It’s functionally no different from using a word processor. You input key presses on your keyboard, and your computer outputs letters on your screen.

However, with an agentic AI program, you could give it general instructions and have it interact with the internet on your behalf.

While the technology is still in its infancy, Google’s parent company, Alphabet (GOOG +0.08%)(GOOGL +0.34%), has already emerged as an early leader in it.

Somewhere, beyond the sea

Subscribers to Google’s $250/month AI ultra plan get access to Project Mariner, the company’s experimental AI agent.

Project Mariner is fully integrated into Chrome and can interact with websites on behalf of its human supervisor through it. For example, Project Mariner can purchase your tickets to a sporting event or concert, or even buy groceries for you online.

It still can’t interact with the physical world on your behalf, it can’t even interact with the internet outside of one browser, but it is far closer to what many of us likely imagined when AI programs first started coming onto the scene in 2022.

There are competitors, of course, both OpenAI and Anthropic offer Operator and Computer Use, respectively. But I think it’s Alphabet that has the most potential for a few reasons.

Google, Google that for me

I’ll start with Alphabet’s edge over OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither of them has turned a profit yet.

Now, both companies have plans to achieve profitability, and Anthropic is far closer to achieving it with a stated goal of 2027 to 2028, but neither one will rival Alphabet anytime soon.

For instance, Anthropic is projecting $70 billion in annual revenue by 2028. Alphabet generated $113.8 billion in Q4 of 2025 alone, which represented 18% growth over Q4 2024, and it managed a net profit margin of 32.81%.

Put simply, Alphabet has way more resources to throw into its AI program than either of the two most prominent companies focused on the industry.

And the meteoric rise of Google Gemini, Alphabet’s answer to Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is further proof of Google’s rising dominance in the AI space.

Back in 2023, ChatGPT controlled a 50% share of the Enterprise Large Language Model (LLM) market. Meta controlled 16%, Anthropic had 12%, and Google Gemini was sitting at a paltry 8%.

Fast forward to the end of 2025, and ChatGPT’s market share has fallen to 27%, and it’s likely to soon be overtaken by Google Gemini, which has surged to 21% market share. Meta, meanwhile, has lost half its market share and fallen to 8% while Anthropic’s Claude has grown to 40% market share.

But Alphabet is set to profit from Anthropic’s rise as well.

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From cyberspace to reality

Unique among its AI peers, which all rely on Nvidia‘s graphics processing unit (GPU), Alphabet is building its own AI hardware, the tensor processing unit (TPU), which it designed in collaboration with Broadcom (AVGO +4.08%).

I’ll spare you the technical details, but there are some key differences in role and cost that mean the TPU and GPU are not necessarily interchangeable. But the TPU does represent one of the first real competitors to Nvidia’s hardware dominance.

And Anthropic announced late last year that it planned to add up to one million TPU chips to its hardware through 2026, or about one gigawatt of computing capacity. So, even when its apparent rivals win, so too does Alphabet, which is an enviable position for a company to be in, wouldn’t you say?

So, given Google’s emerging AI dominance and the fact that it’s one of only a handful of companies to bring an agentic AI to market, albeit in an experimental prototype capacity, I think it’s well poised to be a frontrunner in the agentic step of AI’s evolution as a technology.