In the last 18 months, generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, has inspired the world’s imagination for a brighter future, a future where we can get things done more easily and contribute to solving problems from healthcare to climate change, to education, to poverty and hunger. Some have equated the transformations that AI might bring to the industrial revolution or the introduction of electricity. Before we get carried away, what exactly is GenAI? In its simplest definition, GenAI is the ability of computer systems to process vast amounts of data, learn from it iteratively and present solutions in a very timely manner, sometimes better and faster than our own human intelligence.

Incredibly, we’re now four years removed from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which ushered in a period chock-full of uncertainty. We witnessed the uncertainty personally, a lived experience that will never be fully conveyed in future generative AI searches. But we also saw it expressed in the global stock market. Sharp stock market moves, whether up or down, typically result from significant surprises — an unexpected event, technological innovation, or profit impact that companies or investors did not foresee. Perhaps we can define a sharp reaction as a stock market that is up or down by more than 5% in a calendar quarter — an annualized move of more than 21%. Over the past four years, 81% of quarters have seen a move in the All Country World Index (ACWI) global stock index of greater than 5%, including this past quarter. How does that compare with prior years? In the dozen years immediately preceding the pandemic, only 56% of quarters had moves of more than 5% in either direction. The start of the 2020s has certainly been far from boring.