Hello everyone, Donal McMahon here, Chief AI Officer at Lightspeed Systems. If you’re reading this, you probably already know: AI is having a moment. And when I say a moment, I mean a seismic shift in how we live, learn, and interact. Since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30th, 2022, we’ve seen user growth like never before—over 800 million users in just 34 months. For context, that’s faster uptake than YouTube, Facebook, Google, or even the internet itself saw in their early years. ChatGPT alone hit 100 million users in a single month. For comparison, Google took nearly six years to reach that mark. The pace is breathtaking, and as someone who’s worked in AI at Google, Indeed, and now Lightspeed, I can tell you: this is truly unprecedented.