AI addresses a very real problem within America: fragmentation.
During a chance encounter with a partner at an accounting firm on a plane, I asked him about his thoughts on AI and how he would reinvent his industry. He wanted to standardize many procedures across the industry and get the banks to take on bookkeeping functions. Reflecting on my dad’s accounting work and the countless hours I’d spent helping him with data entry, I narrowed down on digitizing receipts as a proxy for a larger discussion on how AI is shaping his job (and by extension, his associates’ jobs). Many apps now use cameras to parse receipts into accounting software, but OCR (optical character recognition) was unreliable for years, requiring manual oversight. I quipped that a standardized invoicing format could eliminate the need for complex AI workflows: collecting data, cleaning the data, training models, testing models, deploying them, and processing receipts via phone cameras and remote servers all require money, coordination, energy and time. Parsing well-defined, structured digital receipts would be far more energy-efficient. And to drive the point home: if the accounting industry had standardized, how would a high-capex, power-hungry AI threaten them? He pondered it for a minute and repeated that they were a decade too late to do this.
America is fragmented: medical, finance, banking, health, tech, government, payments, insurance…. the list goes on and on. This free market ‘utopia’ is locally sub/optimal but holistically, it’s nonoptimal. Call them Canadian sensibilities but I was bewildered by American institutions and its success despite the chaos. But then it hit me: what I considered fragmentation was actually just a byproduct of a free market ethos. The same free market policies that make the American economy institutionally robust make it inefficient.
But what if we could retain the free market’s flexibility while reaping the efficiency benefits of standardization? Following the accountant’s example, AI could be the bridge between standards by connecting fragmented systems. Many of the AI startups and initiatives aspire to solve this fragmentation problem, and I believe the next decade will see a surge in efforts to address market inefficiencies at scale.
However, it raises the question of whether this makes AI a predominantly tech or American or a free-market necessity. Would countries like Estonia or Singapore benefit from this bridging of fragmentation? With little technological waste, could they skip building massive energy-hungry AI data centers? For a period, yes. But the uses for AI extend far beyond bridging this fragmentation.
AI offers a path to harmonizing America’s chaotic resilience—streamlining its inefficiencies without compromising its core ethos.