Oct 2, 2026 · 48 min · 12 segments
This week on Street Check, Chris and Brad discuss Bain and Company’s recent report that AI needs to generate trillions of dollars of new revenue to justify the buildout, ongoing weakness under the…
I have asked repeatedly in this podcast, where is the return on AI? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Bain Capital went ahead and crunched the numbers.
And what they did is they looked at what the expected spend on the AI build-out looks like for the next five years and what kind of revenue it needs to generate.
They found that AI as a tool is going to need to generate $6 trillion in revenue in 2031.
Of that, they said, hey, two to 400 billion is going to come from the consumer directly.
That is the sort of multi-trillion dollar total addressable market that like SpaceX pointed out.
They only see physical AI and automation contributing $1.4 trillion of that total.
And that leaves a $2.8 trillion gap that is exclusively going to come from new product development.
The reason that that is a big opportunity is that is where every effort is going to be focused by all of these massive companies as soon as it becomes evident.
Right now, there's a little bit of a push into biotech discovery there, but it's pretty clear that that is not going to be the game changer.
The reason it's a big opportunity is because once the consensus sort of lands on something, there is going to be a flood of money.
These AI companies need something to work and they will pull out all the stops to make it work.
Bain Capital doesn't know what it will be, but it is going to grab the market and it will just push money into that area.
So the AI trade has been on again, off again, right? And it's been kind of off lately, maybe not as off in the last few weeks as it was prior to that.
But it's not what we saw in April and May, where it led the market out of the March abyss.
Do you think we get a repeat of that triggered maybe slightly by this, but also by Q3 earnings coming up in a couple of weeks, being past the midterms, that kind of thing.
I have asked repeatedly in this podcast, where is the return on AI? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Bain Capital went ahead and crunched the numbers.
And what they did is they looked at what the expected spend on the AI build-out looks like for the next five years and what kind of revenue it needs to generate.
They found that AI as a tool is going to need to generate $6 trillion in revenue in 2031.
Of that, they said, hey, two to 400 billion is going to come from the consumer directly.
That is the sort of multi-trillion dollar total addressable market that like SpaceX pointed out.
They only see physical AI and automation contributing $1.4 trillion of that total.
And that leaves a $2.8 trillion gap that is exclusively going to come from new product development.
The reason that that is a big opportunity is that is where every effort is going to be focused by all of these massive companies as soon as it becomes evident.
Right now, there's a little bit of a push into biotech discovery there, but it's pretty clear that that is not going to be the game changer.
The reason it's a big opportunity is because once the consensus sort of lands on something, there is going to be a flood of money.
These AI companies need something to work and they will pull out all the stops to make it work.
Bain Capital doesn't know what it will be, but it is going to grab the market and it will just push money into that area.
So the AI trade has been on again, off again, right? And it's been kind of off lately, maybe not as off in the last few weeks as it was prior to that.
But it's not what we saw in April and May, where it led the market out of the March abyss.
Do you think we get a repeat of that triggered maybe slightly by this, but also by Q3 earnings coming up in a couple of weeks, being past the midterms, that kind of thing.
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