How do you define “missed”? I ask because AI is a bit different than those earlier trends: yes, investors wasted money during the dotcom bubble but there were thousands and thousands of places which spent a modest amount of money and saw almost immediate benefits. AI has had some modest wins but there hasn’t been that “customers love this and are switching to OtherCorp for it” moment - it seems like there’s probably a majority of cases where the executives hyped an AI feature and people yawned and ignored it because it was for the product owner’s CV rather than the users. (Repeat a generation later for the me-too mobile apps which started from an executive’s mandate to “be in the App Store”)

In all of these cases, the problem was losing track of what actually benefits users. AI has that problem really bad now because the infrastructure is expensive and the executive class has been sold on the idea that mass layoffs are just around the corner, and they’re pushing hard to ship before the benefits are there.