An MIT expert on which companies will succeed in the AI era

About a decade ago, MIT Sloan School of Management principal research scientist Andrew McAfee bumped into venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson at a conference and asked, “What’s new?” 

Jurvetson, known for early-stage investments in Hotmail and Skype, spent the coffee break telling McAfee all about SpaceX. The company was making waves developing rockets, but Jurvetson was most excited about its potential “to bathe the world in cheap internet connectivity via satellite,” as McAfee put it. 

McAfee, who is co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, said he brushed off the idea. There were enough incumbents in the space industry with expertise and capital. If it were possible, it would have already happened. 

Fast-forward a decade: SpaceX launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite in March, and its valuation surpassed $2 trillion after its June 12 IPO. 

Where McAfee was wrong, he said at the MIT IDE’s 2026 annual conference, was thinking that the way companies thrived in the 20th century applies to an economy dominated by artificial intelligence and digital services. Drawing on the meteoric rise of companies such as SpaceX and Netflix, McAfee discussed what it takes to build a successful company in the modern economy and offered three predictions on who will succeed. 

How companies succeed today: Innovate quickly, concentrate value 

McAfee has said that the “geek way” to run a company is the model for 21st century businesses. The geek way extends the principles of agile software development — which capitalizes on high rates of obsolescence and short product life cycles — to how the entire organization ought to evolve. 

In this environment, innovation becomes a necessity. A company that fails to take advantage of newer, faster technologies associated with Moore’s Law — that the number of transistors on silicon chips doubles every 18 to 24 months — risks going out of business, not just getting passed by competitors, McAfee said. 

“If you can’t successfully grapple with that fundamental fact [of Moore’s Law] — incorporate it, harness it, and profit from it — you are just not going to be around very long,” he said. “This playbook that we developed for running a company during the 20th century doesn’t work in digital, hardware, software, or networking industries.” 

As a result, companies have quickly pushed past what appeared to be impossible. SpaceX built commercially viable, reusable rockets less than 15 years after its founding. Over a similar time frame, Netflix went from mailing DVDs to producing original entertainment. 

The key is agility, McAfee said, and companies that embrace it run circles around competitors that cannot respond fast enough. In 2010, Time Warner brushed off the threat of Netflix as a content producer. In 2025, Netflix won the initial bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (though it later backed out after Paramount made a hostile counteroffer). 

“These are not isolated case studies. This is a broad phenomenon,” McAfee said. “Value creation has become very concentrated among these kinds of [agile] companies.” 

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3 predictions for the future of tech-driven companies 

Value creation has also become concentrated geographically, having shifted in the last century — and especially in the past 25 years — from the New York City area to Detroit and then to Silicon Valley and the Pacific Northwest.  

As the geek way took hold in those corridors, companies that were willing to iterate quickly were well positioned to “colonize” other industries, as McAfee put it. “In general, they were making the incumbents look pretty bad pretty quickly,” he said. 

McAfee offered three predictions for the future of technology-driven companies in this economic environment.  

1. Value creation will continue to move west. Amid the wars, oil shocks, booms, busts, and cultural movements of the last century, the epicenter of the 50 most valuable publicly traded companies in the United States nonetheless moved west. None of those external factors could slow the migration of value creation — and nothing on the horizon is likely to slow things down either. 
2. The most valuable companies will continue to get younger. For most of the 20th century, the average age of the cohort of 50 companies increased by almost a year every year. New entrants were few and far between, while older companies “kept on trudging along through the 20th century, getting more valuable,” McAfee said. Since 2005, though, “America’s largest companies as a group [have been] getting younger in a way that we’ve never seen before.” 
3. Europe will continue to fall behind. Mario Draghi’s 2025 report on European Union competitiveness indicates that the EU lags the U.S. in value creation as well as company age, McAfee pointed out. The total valuation of the EU’s unicorns (privately held companies worth at least $1 billion) is just 10% of that in the U.S. Meanwhile, the top 50 EU companies are nearly 150 years old, on average, and no public company worth $100 billion or more has been created in the past 50 years. Looking at public companies under 50 years old and worth $10 billion, those based in the U.S. have 50 times the market cap of their EU counterparts.  

Can incumbents mount a comeback? 

McAfee said he hopes his predictions are wrong. “I want the incumbents to mount a gigantic comeback,” he said, “not because I love old companies, but I love competition. I want more and more real competitors in these [digital] industries so that all of us consumers get more and more good stuff.”

But he’s not sure that comeback will happen, at least not yet. “The 20th century is history,” he said. “There’s a huge open question about how many of its dominant companies are also going to be history.” 

Watch the talk: Technology-driven organizations and digital culture 

Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder and co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and he was the inaugural Technology and Society Visiting Fellow at Google. He studies how technological progress changes the world. His most recent book, “The Geek Way,” was published in 2023, and he also writes a Substack by the same name.