Why I won't invest in companies that ignore AI — Kevin O'Leary

Artificial intelligence significantly reduces the cost of new customer acquisition, and any company neglecting AI is not a worthwhile investment, according to investor and television personality Kevin O’Leary.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, O’Leary said that new-customer acquisition, which is primarily done through content creation and multimedia marketing, has been “the highest cost increase in the last 36 months.”

“When you look at the cost of creation of that content, it has more than quadrupled. In some cases, it’s 10x,” he said before adding that AI has reduced content production costs by 60%

O’Leary told Cointelegraph that before investing in any prospective businesses, he inquires about their use of AI:

“Before I meet the CEO, I want to know who is running the show in terms of generating and maintaining customer acquisition, customer growth, reducing customer acquisition cost, and increasing ROI on ad spend.”

My first question is, who is running your AI program? What stacks are you on? What tools are you using, and who is doing your social media?”

The reduced acquisition costs, while beneficial to businesses, are eclipsed by the geo-strategic importance of AI and the need to maintain US leadership in the sector, the investor added

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Investment in Bitzero

O’Leary is also an investor in Bitzero, a Bitcoin (BTC) mining and high-performance computing company that operates data centers in Norway, Finland, and the US state of North Dakota.

The investor told Cointelegraph that owning the infrastructure behind Bitcoin and AI would likely prove to be a more sustainable and profitable business model than pursuing the businesses that this infrastructure serves.

“It’s the old analogy from the gold days hundreds of years ago. The guys who made the most money with the least risk sold the jeans and the picks and shovels,” he said.

The US and China are in an AI cold war

“We are in a technological war with China — we really are,” the investor said. O’Leary compared AI chips to the queen bee in a bee colony and AI developers to the worker bees.

Developers and programmers gather around new AI chips and produce the “honey” or computer code, the investor told Cointelegraph.

Private investment into AI by country 2013-2024. Source: Visual CapitalistBy limiting the use of AI chips built by US companies through sanctions and punitive trade policies, it allows competing nations to have their chipsets and architectures proliferate, and steer AI development, O’Leary concluded.

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