Seize the opportunities before your competitors do. That sentence has sat on the first page of almost every technology guide for the past twenty years. It is not a threat in plain words. The meaning is clear enough: act now or lose.
First it was e-commerce, then digitalisation, then the cloud, now AI. The opening line does not change. Each time, the fear arrives with it.
The mechanism has a name. FOMO, fear of missing out. It works as a marketing tool because fear does the job an argument would otherwise have to do. Frighten someone about what they might miss and you no longer have to explain what you are selling.
For some products the fear is at least plausible. Medication, insurance or alarm systems trade on it because the danger they name is real. For technology it strikes me as absurd.
So I put the same question to every sales pitch: would this product also work if nobody was afraid? When the answer is no, fear is doing the selling.
In thirty years of work, I have seen the same cycle more than once. A technology arrives to a lot of excitement. The majority soon grows afraid of missing it. Then come the disappointments, because things rarely run the way the vendors promised or the buyers planned. Broad adoption arrives much later, long after the first rush of fear has passed.
The best technologies never needed fear to get started. They solved a problem you already had, one you had lived with before you knew a solution existed. AI can be that, but not when the product opens with act now or lose. When the first sentence is a threat, I ask what else is on offer. Often the answer is nothing.