Azeem Azhar
Founder, Exponential View
Trace a path from Azeem Azhar →Portrait painted after an image by World Economic Forum · CC BY 3.0
About
Azeem Azhar is a British technology entrepreneur and writer who has spent three decades explaining technology to the institutions it disrupts. After studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, he covered technology for The Guardian and business for The Economist, helped launch BBC Online, and later led innovation at Reuters. He founded the social-analytics company PeerIndex in 2009, sold it to Brandwatch in 2014, and the next year started Exponential View, a newsletter and research group on AI and technological change. His book The Exponential Age (2021) argues that technologies improving at exponential rates have opened an 'exponential gap' with institutions that change only incrementally. He hosts Exponentially with Azeem Azhar for Bloomberg Originals and co-chairs a World Economic Forum Global Future Council on complex risks.
Key Contributions
- Founded Exponential View in 2015, a newsletter and research group on AI and technological change read by investors, academics and policymakers
- Wrote The Exponential Age (2021), which names the 'exponential gap' between accelerating technology and the slower institutions meant to govern it
- Founded PeerIndex in 2009, a social-media analytics company acquired by Brandwatch in 2014
- Covered technology for The Guardian and business for The Economist, and helped launch BBC Online
- Hosts Exponentially with Azeem Azhar on Bloomberg Originals; named to Vox's Future Perfect 50 in 2023
Close Listening
Videos & Interviews
Connections
Paul Kedrosky
DebatedPartner, SK Ventures & Research Fellow, MIT
On The Ezra Klein Show in October 2026, on this site with a Close Listening, they took opposite sides of whether AI is a bubble, and the disagreement turned out to be about what to count. Kedrosky counts capital and fragility: 'a bubble is whenever asset prices detach from any semblance of economic reality,' and every general-purpose buildout from canals to fiber has overbuilt. Azhar counts customers, calling it a productive boom 'with the hints of maybe getting… a little bit stinky.' Even their closing tests split the same way: enterprise spending for Azhar, productivity and GDP for Kedrosky.
youtube.com · nytimes.com
Mustafa Suleyman
In conversationCEO, Microsoft AI
In February 2026 Azhar recorded 'AI is hacking our empathy circuits' with Suleyman for Exponential View, a week before OpenClaw broke. Suleyman's warning about 'seemingly conscious AI,' and about people granting rights to systems that only appear to feel, is Azhar's exponential gap at its most intimate: the technology arriving faster than the norms that would tell us how to treat it.
podbay.fm · podcasts.apple.com
Anil Seth
In conversationProfessor of Cognitive & Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex
Seth was Azhar's guest on Exponential View in January 2022, talking, in Seth's own summary, about 'consciousness, AI, and I get grumpy about the metaverse.' It is where Azhar's technologist's question, what these systems will do, meets Seth's neuroscientist's one, whether anything is home: Seth holds that intelligence and consciousness come apart, and that a machine can have the first without the second.
anilseth.com · hbr.org
Yuval Noah Harari
In conversationHistorian & Public Intellectual
Harari was the third guest on Azhar's Exponential View podcast, in February 2017, talking through Homo Deus. Read beside The Exponential Age, the pairing is interpretive but close: both write big-picture histories in which technology outruns the institutions meant to hold it, Harari from the long arc of the species, Azhar from the curve of the last fifty years.
producthunt.com
