A few weeks ago, I created an AI assistant to run my diary, hoping it would help manage my packed schedule and the daily blizzard of financial news.

My new PA-bot needs careful supervision. It sometimes fails to register the most important announcements, such as BP selling its North Sea operations.

As for appointments, well, it sent me out two days early to a lunch with Steven Fine, the chief executive of stockbroker Peel Hunt, to much amusement.

It also told me I was wrong to say Andy Burnham is the Prime Minister. Given how improbable that still seems, perhaps it was an excusable error.

For all its wonders, the technology has serious limitations. Stocks are priced to perfection but AI seems about as reliable as a toddler permanently threatening to escape her playpen.

Nerves were prickling last week at the downfall of 24-year-old AI wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner, whose portfolio was sold to Citadel after heavy losses. Perhaps it’s a storm in a teacup, but hedge fund implosions often herald wider disaster, as they did in 2008.

So investors are turning to traditional stocks such as oil, banking and engineering, which figure heavily on the FTSE100.

The blue chip index has been touching record highs as companies including Rolls Royce, BAE Systems, Shell, Lloyds and NatWest have reported impressive results.

AI-mania spawned a false narrative that the Footsie is just an old-economy scrapyard. When I made it to lunch on the right day, Steven Fine pointed out that the Footsie has been outperforming its US rivals for half a decade, once dividends are taken into account.

The total return on the FTSE 100 over five years was 85 per cent, compared with 80 per cent from the S&P and 75 per cent from the Nasdaq.

So why are companies such as property giant Segro rolling over to US bidders? Why are UK pension funds investing only a few pennies in every pound of our money in British companies?

There are genuine problems that should be addressed. Stamp duty on share purchases hurts the City and should be scrapped.

Pension funds should be given a dividend tax credit on UK equity holdings. The Burnham Government should invoke the National Security and Investment Act in the case of Segro, whose data centres are strategic assets.

Measures to boost capital markets ought to be a priority if the PM wants growth in every postcode.

It doesn’t surprise me that investors are rediscovering established companies whose business is anchored in real-world assets and actual profits. There is a built-in hollowness at the heart of AI in the way it is engineered to maximise ‘efficiency’.

Claude AI describes its ‘efficient’ approach to research as ‘the least effort that plausibly satisfies rather than the most thorough effort available.’

When humans offer a bare minimum of effort rather than striving for their best work, we see it as anti-social, lazy and the sign of a flimsy character.

When this behaviour underpins AI, which possesses neither morality nor shame, it risks embedding industrial-scale skiving as the new normal.

This could, if we are not careful, devalue the pursuit of excellence. In the long term, that would be a disaster for economies and societies.

As investors pull back from the AI hype to rediscover British blue-chip businesses, politicians must wake up too.

Why are we selling off the family silver? And do we want an economy built on solidity, quality and real returns, or one spun like candyfloss from plausible promises?