The business world today faces a “shortage of creators,” and a growing need to build products that never existed before. Evgeny Chereshnev, Senior Vice President at AFK Sistema, made the case during his visionary lecture, AI Agent Economy: What Happens When AI Takes the Lead.
Chereshnev is convinced that in the age of artificial intelligence, a unique selling proposition (USP) is no longer about creating a product built-in AI. It is about the ability to keep generating new USPs – to produce things no one else has thought of yet.
“Someone comes up with an idea and puts it online. Everyone with AI agents immediately starts copying it, because it works. The only way to survive is to keep creating something new, over and over – and only a handful of people can do that,” he said.
Chereshnev noted that AI adoption inside companies is currently hitting significant slowdowns. In his view, the culprit is the lack of automation.
“When you look around – at corporations or state-owned enterprises – you don’t see AI implemented everywhere. Why? A manager might order immediate implementation. Technical specialists try to carry it out, only to discover that some companies and departments are still filing reports on paper,” he pointed out.
The speaker cautioned, however, against assuming that AI is flawless or always capable of delivering high-quality solutions and recommendations.
“All AI systems carry a certain margin of error – up to 5%. If you have a 5% error rate and more and more people are generating content that contains those errors, the errors multiply,” Chereshnev noted.
He also identified energy as the modern “number one currency”: forecasts suggest that global electricity consumption by AI will reach 950 TWh by 2030.
“If you want to create a stablecoin, you need to peg it to kilowatt-hours, because the energy sector – and energy itself – is the primary asset today,” Chereshnev concluded.
