AI Isn’t a Bubble-It’s a Wildfire. And We’re Already in It.

TL/DR

• AI isn’t behaving like a “bubble" - it's moving like a wildfire: fast, unsettling, revealing, regenerative.

• How to prepare: neuroscience tells us to prune what no longer serves so that focus, strength, and resilience can emerge. Actionable takeaway

• History lesson: The Dot-Com "bubble" and the fundamentals of those who survived - customer obsession, connected platforms, simplicity, ship small, learn fast, compound Actionable takeaway

• Across ecosystems, neurons, and economies, the pattern repeats: burn, clear, renew.

• The task for leaders is not to avoid the flames, but to learn how to guide them.

The AI Bubble

People often reach for metaphors when faced with uncertainty. It is a world-old instinct: to make sense of the unknown we compare it to what we already understand.

Lately, my entire feed seems to be holding onto one such metaphor - the idea that AI is a bubble about to burst. Perhaps. I should say I respect the provenance of the “bubble” - it comes from decades of market cycles and hard-earned lessons about hype, inflation, and collapse. It signals danger: a sudden swelling, a sharp collapse, an ending after which little remains. There’s wisdom in that.

But when I look closely at what’s happening - the speed, the dislocation, the way industries tremble at the edges - “bubble” feels too thin for something this seismic.

A bubble bursts. It’s over. The current moment feels more alive than that.

The bubble in this AI-generated image looks beautiful. But does it truly capture the depth of what's happening?

A friend recently compared AI to a wildfire moving through a forest. At first I resisted the image - fire felt more frightening than bubbles. But the more I sat with it, the more I found it fitting. And even reassuring.

Wildfires: Nature’s Reset Button

Bubbles pop and disappear. Wildfires don’t.

Wildfires build heat quickly, spread unpredictably, and then - seemingly overnight - reshape the contours of the land. Their touch is not even: they burn what’s brittle, expose structures that can’t hold, and clear spaces once hidden beneath the weeds.

Wildfires - destruction and transformation?

Since I'm borrowing the metaphor, it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge that real wildfires leave real marks on people and places. Their cost is not abstract or poetic. Yet even in their harshness, they have an important role: in nature, wildfires are also regenerative. Entire ecosystems depend on them to clear dead vegetation, re-fertilise the ground, and kick-start a process ecologists call Ecological Succession - the gradual reshaping of a landscape into something stronger, more resilient, more capable of thriving (Keeley et al., 2011).

If you’ve led teams through real change, you’ve seen this pattern: a layer of operational clutter goes, the pace accelerates, and suddenly you’re forced to decide what’s essential… and what (process, tech, Ways of Working, structure) has been sitting there out of habit.

AI's Fire is Spreading Through Organisations

Clearing out slow systems, collapsing pointless hand-offs, and exposing where human creativity is irreplaceable. It’s uncomfortable, chaotic, and - if we steward it well - deeply rejuvenating.

So is the question really “How do we stop the fire?”  

Or “How do we guide it?”

If the organisations that thrive aren't the ones trying to stay untouched, but the ones willing to reshape themselves as the landscape shifts, what are the containment lines that guide the wildfire without smothering it?

The answer may be in an unexpected place - the human brain.

Monkeys and Focus by Subtraction

Infant face-processing becomes specialised through experience (Pascalis et al., 2005).

If wildfires show us how complex systems reset, the brain shows us how they refocus - the process of Synaptic Pruning.

When we’re born, our brains are wildly over-connected. A fun fact I still remember from my first year of studies (despite discovering British ale in the same month): at 5-6 months old, infants can tell one monkey face (Bob) from another (Alan).

By 8-9 months, this ability fades. Not because we get worse, but because the brain prunes away connections that aren’t useful for survival. Human focus is limited; the world is noisy. So the brain trims aggressively, keeping only what helps us thrive (Sorry Bob, you are still unique, we just can't tell at first sight).

We often speak of complex organisations, but not even finance, healthcare or the public sector come close to the complexity of the human brain. Its patterns run far deeper than any system we’ve designed, and we’d be unwise to ignore its teachings: survival isn’t about resisting change, but about bending with it.

In much of the Western world, we tend to give precedence to the bold, headline-worthy goals - they just sound more impressive in the boardroom. ‘Let’s lighten the system’ rarely earns a round of applause in leadership meetings. Yet the natural world (and many Eastern communities) have long understood that whilst flashy - endurance, speed, scale - aren’t the starting points. They are the outcomes. Going headfirst for the sensational can trip us up; but if on our way there, we do the less glamorous work first: lightening the system, adapting, softening, we might just get there. McKinsey’s latest Rewired research points to the same pattern: simplify the system and strengthen the core to let new capabilities emerge (McKinsey & Company, 2025).

Actionable Takeaway: If you want support getting clear on what’s truly essential, so you know what to invest in and what to prune out, the Agilicist Strengthen Your Neural Core Guidebook could be a good place to start - message me for a copy.

Looking Back to Plan Ahead: The Stock Market and Dot-Com Firestorms

Apple soared after Dot Com: by 2025 its stock had risen by 10,000% since March 2000 (Yahoo Finance)

When you zoom out far enough, forests, brains, and markets follow the same rhythm: under heat, each lets go of what’s brittle so something stronger can grow. When the Dot-Com "bubble" burst in 2000, the landscape had its own version of overpopulation. It was crowded with companies, inflated valuations, and business models, some of which held together by charisma and caffeine. Then almost overnight, the fire swept through.

Thousands of companies disappeared. The crash looked like devastation. In hindsight, it was also restructuring.

Those with real fundamentals - Amazon, Apple, Salesforce - not only survived, but used the newly cleared space to become category-defining giants. And the MAG7 didn’t rise alone. Thousands of post-crash companies learned from their example, adopting the operating disciplines that had allowed them to endure. Many of those principles are still the backbone of how the industry works today:

• Customer obsession over feature obsession - Amazon’s core principle

• Platform over product - Apple realised the iPod alone wasn’t defensible, so they built an ecosystem around it - iTunes, iSync, eventually the App Store. Amazon built AWS. Salesforce, AppExchange.

• Relentless simplification - Netflix rebuilt everything onto AWS after recognising their monolith couldn’t weather future fires. Google formalised SRE.

• Ship small, learn fast, compound - The crash highlighted that slow cycles were a liability. Continuous deployment, A/B testing, and iterative delivery became the safest ways to build in uncertainty.

These were the seeds that survived the burn, the core neural connections that stayed intact and reinforced the system.

Actionable Takeaway: Audit your AI strategy for fundamentals, not features. Start by asking:

• Budget: Is there real 3-year ROI here, or does it just look innovative?

• Subtract: What can we simplify - process, tools, approvals - before adding something new?

• Cycle Speed: Are we iterating fast enough to learn from reality?

• Resilience: Where are we most fragile? How do we shore that up before the pressure hits?

Putting It Together: AI as a Natural Landscape Reset

Seen through these lenses - the macro of ecosystems, the micro of brains, the economic markets view - the AI surge looks less like an apocalyptic inflation and more like a natural process of pruning, resetting, and reshaping.

Heraclitus said, “Fire is the origin of all things.”

That is the invitation of this moment: let go of what no longer serves, strengthen what does, and rebuild with intention rather than nostalgia.

Grow forward in the new landscape.

The one we knew is never coming back.

If you want support turning the heat of AI into something usable - something that strengthens your organisation rather than scorches it - that’s exactly the kind of work we love doing at Agilicist.

The fire is not the end. It's the beginning of new growth.