We celebrated our Growing Together luncheon last week at the beautiful Aquatopia Conservatory, in Carp. It’s always a delight to see our clients chatting together and so much fun to share time together. Of course, not everyone could make it and we don’t want anyone to feel left out! So for those of you who were unable to attend, we’ve attached a link to the video and provide a brief summary of the keynote below.
Front Row Seats to a Revolution
Three years ago in San Francisco, OpenAI released ChatGPT. That spark has been fanned into a fire and is racing from industry to industry, and shows no sign of slowing. We now have front-row seats to the most consequential technological revolution in living memory.
A Library of Human Intelligence: How Fast AI is Evolving
To grasp the scale, imagine a library that holds the entire corpus of human intelligence (everything written for the past 6000 years). Now picture adding two more libraries next year, and sixteen more shortly after, not by photocopying what’s already on the shelves, but by generating new insights, proofs, code, designs, and therapies. That is what modern AI systems are doing as they learn to reason, not just autocomplete. The shelves aren’t filling linearly; they’re inflecting higher. Imagine the discoveries that will be made!
The Rails—and the Towns That Follow: Investing in Infrastructure
Like Canada’s railway boom, the biggest fortunes weren’t made in the steel alone but in what the rails enabled: grain elevators, ports, mining, hotels, banks, and insurers. AI is our generation’s railway. The point isn’t simply “more tech stocks.” It’s that infrastructure creates entire ecosystems—and productivity gains compound across the real economy.
The Three Floors of the AI Economy
We structure our investing around a three-floor building:
- Basement (Infrastructure): Power plants, upgraded grids, and the shells of data centers the size of small cities. This is the physical bedrock that keeps the lights on and the servers humming.
- Main Floor (Compute): The racks of GPUs and the hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google) turning electrons into intelligence output. Cash-gushing businesses funding this buildout largely from operating cash flow.
- Second Floor (Operating Leverage): Incumbent banks, utilities, telcos, manufacturers, health systems—everyday businesses that wield AI to cut costs, raise throughput, and lift margins. This is where broad-based productivity growth shows up in earnings—and ultimately in GDP.
We invest across all three because, as with the railway, the interconnections create the value.
Why This Isn’t a Bubble (Yet)
We’ve lived through manias and crashes. What’s different today?
Real cash, not easy equity. Hyperscalers are funding buildouts from cash flow, not from waves of fragile IPOs.
Earnings follow the capex. When infrastructure delivers usable intelligence, unit costs fall, adoption accelerates, and profits expand—especially on the second floor.
We remain vigilant on valuation and risk management. But based on today’s evidence, we are not seeing the classic signs of a late-stage bubble.
What This Means for Productivity and Portfolios
AI already handles a material share of professional tasks and is improving month by month. Seconds of compute gave us autocomplete; minutes to hours unlocked reasoning and digital agents; weeks to months will deliver frontier discoveries—drug candidates, new materials, better designs. That’s a recipe for a productivity shock: more done, more quickly for less. History suggests those gains accrue to well-positioned incumbents and the infrastructure that supports them.
Our Approach: Discipline, Diversification, and Disruption
Discipline: Own Basement + Main Floor + Second Floor—not just the shiny parts.
Diversification: Balance growth with ballast. We pair growth exposures with gold, Bitcoin, commodities, and selected bonds—not because we’re gloomy, but because prudent people fasten their seat belts.
Disruption: We’re evolving client portfolios bespoke to your goals and upgrading our own research stack with AI “digital employees” that read transcripts, parse macro data, and track positioning—so we can spend more time on judgment, conversations, and execution.
The Spirit Behind the Strategy
Our motto is simple and sincere: “Our family, serving your family.” Serving means telling you not just what’s comfortable, but what we believe you need to hear so you don’t miss the opportunity in front of us.
“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but is the furthest thing from it… cynicism is self-imposed blindness.” —Stephen Colbert
We refuse to turn a blind eye to this opportunity. We intend to be prepared.
Watch the Talk (and Share It)
If it resonates, please forward this blog post and share the video with friends and family who care about positioning wisely for the next decade.
With gratitude,
Glen, Briana, and Anne Evans
Evans Family Wealth