Dot-com era has lessons for AI industry, longtime executive says

AI has been called the driver of a new industrial revolution, but some longtime tech observers have urged caution, remembering the dot-com boom and bust of the late ’90s.

It’s an imperfect analogy. But for Snyk CEO Peter McKay, whose career as an executive spanned the heights of the dot-com boom (and the subsequent crash), there are some parallels—as well as some major differences.

For one thing, he told IT Brew, the AI era differs from the dot-com age in how agile and effective businesses are now, and how capable they are of scaling up.

“It’s moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen before,” McKay said. “Everything that you had to do and adapt and change and pivot, you have to do it even faster in this era—which drives decision making, which drives hiring, which drives the investments you make in certain areas.”

Moving forward. The market has seen those changes. Car manufacturers have turned to AI to help their products, with nine in 10 executives naming the tech as a priority in 2024. In 2025, large firms like Microsoft have continued their capital investments in the technology, while AI hardware continues to drive the market.

That faster operation scale has increased staff productivity, McKay said, allowing incumbent firms to take advantage of their investments. That doesn’t necessarily mean that smaller and medium-size firms are cut out of the process, though. There’s so much cash and energy being directed at the AI space that it’s impossible for the large companies to take it all. And that’s a good thing, McKay said.

“There’ll come a time when there’ll be massive consolidation—we see it in the cyber market and security, incredible fragmentation, and then it consolidates, and then it expands again, and then it consolidates,” McKay told IT Brew. “This is what these industries go through.”

Ebb and flow. That normal evolution can also be expected when it comes to AI, McKay said, and the future of the business will rely in part on how investments are spread around. For IT teams, that will mean watching as companies develop products and consolidate through the life cycle of capital.

“You go through the hype cycles and trough of disillusionment, and then you settle into a normal market,” McKay said.