THINK Ahead: How to survive without AI
At a Glance
Per the full note from ING's James Smith, the desk is arguing that the global economy's growing dependence on AI infrastructure creates a concentrated fragility that markets are underpricing — and that a 2027 'No-AI' scenario is a fatter tail than the 2% of webinar attendees who flagged supply shocks would suggest. The evidence is the bank's own audience poll: just 2% picked new supply shocks including cyberattacks as the top 2027 risk, versus 34% who chose an AI bubble bursting. Smith's framing is that a chatbot outage is trivial, but the embeddedness of AI in power, payments and compute is not — and that the damage function from critical-infrastructure failure is convex. The piece is a narrative risk note, not a forecast, so there is no FX pair or policy target attached; it sits behind the AI-capex channel that currently drives US equity and rate expectations.
Key Takeaways
- 01ING's James Smith frames AI as critical infrastructure, making resilience risk — not just bubble risk — the underpriced tail for 2027.
- 02Only 2% of ING's Global Outlook webinar audience picked supply shocks/cyberattacks as the top 2027 risk; 34% chose an AI bubble bursting.
- 03The Spain 2025 blackout is the desk's precedent: short outages are survivable, but duration and contagion are the real damage channel.
- 04No FX pair or policy target is attached — the read-through is via AI capex, US equities and the rates curve.
Full Analysis
What the desk is arguing
The thesis, stated plainly: the market is underweight the resilience risk embedded in AI dependence, and overweights the bubble-bursting risk by comparison. Per the full note , Smith uses a same-day Copilot/Microsoft outage as the hook, then pivots to the harder question of whether the global economy could function in 2027 without AI. The desk's implicit claim is that AI is now critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure failures are underpriced.
The supporting evidence is the webinar poll split: only 2% of the audience chose new supply shocks (including cyberattacks) as the biggest 2027 risk, against 34% for an AI bubble bursting and stock markets crashing. Smith leans on the Spain blackout of 2025 as a precedent — it barely registered in growth figures, which cuts both ways: outages are survivable, but the tail is about duration and contagion, not a few hours. The note is explicitly a resilience argument rather than a growth forecast.
The counterfactual the desk is rejecting is the consensus framing that AI risk is purely a valuation/bubble risk. If AI is infrastructure, the risk is operational and correlated — a single vendor outage propagates through payments, cloud and power. That is a different, and less hedged, exposure than an equity drawdown.
How other firms see it
The related macro channels are the AI-capex cycle and its funding: US technology capex, the US equity complex, and the rates curve that discounts it. Watch USD/JPY and the US 10-year as the transmission vehicles — a resilience shock would hit risk assets and the dollar together, while a bubble-burst would be a classic risk-off dollar bid. EUR/USD is the cleaner read on the European growth spillover if AI capex slows.
What the calendar says
No high-impact events sit on the calendar in the next 30 days for this jurisdiction, so there is no scheduled catalyst to trade against. Treat this as a slow-burn narrative risk rather than an event-driven trade; the tell will be in positioning and in AI-capex guidance from the next earnings cycle, not in a data print.
Market Implications
Watch US technology capex guidance and the US 10-year yield as the primary transmission of an AI-resilience shock; a genuine infrastructure failure would hit risk assets and the dollar simultaneously, unlike a bubble-burst which is a risk-off dollar bid. EUR/USD is the cleanest European spillover read if AI capex slows. Positioning in AI-linked equities is the signal to monitor, since the note is a narrative-risk argument rather than a data-driven call.
From the original
Opinions Opinion by James Smith THINK Ahead: How to survive without AI Published 14:55 Translate We've all had to learn to live without a *certain* chatbot for the last 24 hours, but could the global economy survive without AI in 2027? James Smith goes all agentic and looks at ho
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