Why we believe AI is a multi-decade productivity story — and why the safest way for retirees to benefit is not by trying to pick the next Nvidia.
The question clients keep asking me
Almost every review meeting lately includes some version of the same question. “Should I have AI stocks in my super?” Or its anxious twin: “Is AI a bubble that’s going to wipe out my retirement savings?”
Both questions come from the same place — the worry that something big is happening and you might be on the wrong side of it. If you’re in your 50s or 60s and counting down to retirement, that worry is completely understandable. You don’t have 40 working years to recover from a mistake.
But in my view, both questions are the wrong level of analysis. Most people look at AI and think about the latest chatbot, or whether a particular AI share is expensive this month. The better question is this:
My answer: AI is not the next app. It is closer to the internet, electricity, cloud computing or the smartphone — technologies that didn’t stay in one industry, but became embedded across the entire economy.
The dial-up to broadband analogy
If you’re planning retirement today, you lived through this one. In the dial-up era, the internet already existed. You could send an email, eventually. The technology worked — the problem was speed and usability.
Then broadband arrived, and everything changed:
- Adoption exploded
- Businesses changed how they operated
- Entirely new companies emerged
- Productivity rose across industries
- Old business models were disrupted
Here’s the part most people forget. At the time, almost nobody knew who the ultimate winners would be. Many early internet darlings disappeared completely. But the internet itself won.
I believe we are now in the “early broadband” phase of AI. The technology works. The infrastructure is being built at extraordinary scale. The adoption curve is accelerating. And the economic impact is only just beginning.
The PMW house view
Our base case is simple to state:
Just as the internet reshaped banking, media, retail, education and communication, we expect AI to reshape professional services, accounting, financial advice, medicine, software development, customer service, logistics and manufacturing. Virtually every industry, over time.
That timeframe matters enormously for retirees. A 10–20 year theme overlaps almost perfectly with a modern retirement. If you retire at 65 today, your portfolio likely needs to work for 25 to 30 years. AI isn’t something happening to “the next generation” — it’s something your retirement capital will live through.
First, second and third-order winners
Where do many investors get it wrong? They think: “I need to find the next Nvidia.” That is speculation. History suggests the bigger, more reliable money is made by owning the entire ecosystem. Here’s how we think about that ecosystem in three layers:
The infrastructure builders
The companies supplying the “picks and shovels” — chips, data centres and cloud platforms. Think of the equipment suppliers in a gold rush.
The productivity adopters
Banks, insurers, healthcare providers, software and industrial businesses that use AI to lower costs and lift profits — potentially for decades.
The companies that don’t exist yet
In 1995, nobody predicted Google, Facebook, Uber or Netflix. They emerged because the infrastructure existed. AI will likely do the same.
Most clients focus entirely on the first layer. But the biggest beneficiary of AI may not be an “AI company” at all. It may be an ordinary, profitable business that reduces its labour costs by 20% and compounds that advantage for twenty years. And the third layer — the future giants we can’t name yet — is precisely why trying to pick today’s single winner is so dangerous.
The lesson retirees must not forget
Every major technological revolution goes through the same cycle: genuine breakthrough, hype, excessive valuations, painful correction. The internet was utterly transformative — and yet:
The technology was real. The investors who concentrated everything into a handful of internet names still lost enormous sums. That is the crucial lesson:
For someone in their 30s, a drawdown like that is painful but survivable. For someone drawing an income from their portfolio in retirement, a concentrated bet that halves is a different kind of event — it can permanently change your lifestyle. This is why our view on AI comes with an equally firm view on how to own it.
Live case study: the SpaceX float and your index funds
You don’t have to look far for a real-time example of everything above. On 12 June 2026, SpaceX listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX — raising around US$75 billion at a valuation near US$1.75 trillion, briefly trading above US$2 trillion on day one. It was the largest sharemarket float in history, instantly making SpaceX one of the most valuable listed companies in the world.
It’s a genuinely exciting business. But in our view, the SpaceX listing is less a stock tip and more a perfect teaching moment about how modern index investing can quietly increase your risk — especially if you’re a retiree who assumed “the index fund in my super” was the safe, boring option.
The part most people miss: index funds don’t choose — they’re forced to buy
A passive index fund doesn’t weigh up whether a company is good value. It simply holds whatever the index tells it to hold. So when a giant new company is added to an index, every fund tracking that index must buy it — at whatever price the market sets that day — and sell a slice of everything else to make room.
That’s exactly what’s now in motion. To accommodate SpaceX, the NASDAQ rewrote its rules with a new “fast entry” pathway, allowing a company this size into the Nasdaq-100 within roughly two weeks of listing rather than the usual 12-month wait. The practical effect:
Funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 are being compelled to sell down Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and the rest to buy a single brand-new holding — mechanically, not on merit.
The S&P 500 committee declined to fast-track SpaceX. Broad S&P 500 trackers won’t hold it until at least mid-2027 — and only if it meets the profitability test.
A wave of single-stock and leveraged SpaceX ETFs launched alongside the float — high-risk trading vehicles, not retirement building blocks.
This is the headline point of the PMW house view, and it’s the one Manny keeps coming back to with clients: two “safe, passive” index funds can now own a wildly different amount of the same expensive new company — or none of it at all. Index choice, which most people never think about, has quietly become one of the biggest risk decisions in a portfolio.
How this increases risk for a retiree
From where we sit, the SpaceX listing stacks several risks on top of one another — and they matter far more when you’re drawing an income than when you’re still accumulating:
- Valuation risk. A ~US$1.75 trillion price tag on a company still reporting accounting losses is the dot-com lesson in real time: you can be right about the technology and still overpay badly.
- Concentration risk. Adding another enormous, single-theme name to the top of the Nasdaq-100 makes an already top-heavy index even more dependent on a handful of mega-caps. “Diversified” index funds can be far less diversified than they sound.
- Forced-buyer / price risk. When billions of dollars of index money must buy a low-float stock regardless of price, the price is driven by supply and demand mechanics, not fundamentals — which can cut hard in both directions.
- Key-person and control risk. A founder-controlled business with a dual-class structure concentrates an unusual amount of fate in one person and one vision.
- Liquidity and hype risk. With only a small slice of shares actually trading, sharp swings are likely — and the surrounding leveraged products are built for traders, not for someone funding 25–30 years of retirement.
How this links to the PMW house view
None of this changes our position — it reinforces it. We don’t build portfolios around a single name, a single theme, or a single index. Owning the world’s best businesses broadly means that if SpaceX genuinely becomes a long-term winner, you’ll share in it as it grows — without betting your retirement income on a low-float, loss-making newcomer at its most hyped moment.
It also underlines something we say constantly: “passive” is not the same as “risk-free.” The index you track, how concentrated it has become, and what it’s being forced to buy are all real decisions hiding inside what looks like a single tick-box on your super statement. Knowing exactly what sits inside your investment option — and whether it still matches the income you’ll be drawing — is precisely the work we do for clients.
What this means for your retirement portfolio
The PMW house view is not to turn portfolios into AI portfolios. The view is to stay sensibly and broadly invested in global equities — because global markets naturally allocate more capital to the winners as they emerge, whichever layer they come from.
This is also one reason we have historically favoured a meaningful allocation to global shares alongside Australian shares. Australia represents only around 2% of global sharemarket value, and most of the world’s major AI beneficiaries are simply not listed here. A portfolio that never leaves home risks watching this story from the sidelines.
If I were explaining it across the table, I’d put it this way:
But I do believe AI will make businesses more productive across the whole economy. So we want broad exposure to high-quality global companies, rather than gambling your retirement on a handful of AI stocks.”
That’s the position in one sentence: AI is real, it’s likely a multi-decade productivity revolution, and the safest way for most retirees to benefit is through diversified ownership of the world’s best businesses — not by trying to pick a single winner.
The plan is the vehicle. Peace of mind is the destination. That applies to AI just as it applies to everything else we do.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI a bubble?
Should I buy individual AI stocks in my super?
I’m close to retirement — is it too late to benefit from AI?
What if there’s a big correction in AI shares?
Does Plan My Wealth recommend specific AI companies?
Should I buy SpaceX shares now that it’s listed?
Do I already own SpaceX through my super?
If the AI headlines have you wondering whether your retirement is positioned the right way — or simply feeling uneasy about it all — let’s sit down and talk it through.
Book a free consultation
With 17+ years’ experience and over 1,000 retirement plans built for Australian families, Manny works with clients aged 50 to 65 across Bundoora, metropolitan Melbourne, and nationally via video consultation. His focus is helping pre-retirees replace uncertainty with a clear, evidence-based plan.
+61 433 564 003 · manny@planmywealth.com.au · Book a free consultation
