AI, Business, and Entrepreneurship

Yeah, when looking at how generative AI will impact different parts of the economy, it's really interesting to see how big it's gotten so quickly. ChatGPT was released in November of 22, and we're already looking at projected revenues of almost 3.7 billion in this calendar year, growing tenfold over the next five years. As an information technology, there's really three ways you can see people doing business around these things. One is providing the technology as a service. You've heard software as a service. We're now hearing model as a service from these big providers of these solutions. The second way is looking at new novel applications based on this technology, and this is perhaps the most interesting area for me, is entrepreneurs find new ways to do business based on these tools. And you can think of personal assistance or tools for your company to automatically manage those social media streams based on this technology. And then the third way is vertical integration, so you have existing software solutions out there that are managing information streams, whether it's in the design space or the information space. And these tools will be added on as additional capabilities. Think of Photoshop with the ability to do generative AI to fill in parts of an image based on a text prompt. Yeah, when thinking about opportunities for industries to take advantage of this technology, obviously as an information system, these are tools that will make sense in information industries, whether it's content creation or content management. And you see these tools naturally slotting into existing workflows, whether it's document management or content creation for artists or marketing organizations. I think the challenge is understanding where is the data that feeds these systems within your value chain, and that's where the opportunity lies as well. Do you have unique business assets that can be used to train these systems to create unique incremental value for your company or for your customers? And then within that, the challenge is managing the provenance of these data so that you can know that you have proprietary rights to leverage them for new incremental value delivery. Yeah, when looking at generative AI through the lens of a business owner or an aspiring entrepreneur, I think it comes down to first, the data. Data is the coin of the realm with this new technology. And the data is what you will use to create value out of the large language model. And look, within your organization to see what assets you have and what might be used to create a generative AI solution to create incremental value for you within your operations or for your customers. For entrepreneurs, this is an exciting new time, and trying to understand where business is going to be with generative AI and what are the opportunities that will be afforded by that. As Wayne Gretzky says, skate to where the puck's going to be. What are the business trends? And how is doing business going to change? And what new opportunities exist because of that? You can look at digital assets you might be able to get access to as an entrepreneur. Or you may look at process expertise, or connecting the dots between previously disconnected workflows in the enterprise and monetize those. Or you can go back to the old adage in a gold rush, be the one who sells picks and shovels. because there's going to be a lot of needs for picks and shovels in this new world. Figuring out what that means in the age of generative AI is a great place to look. Yeah, for aspiring entrepreneurs in this space, the opportunity is to look at what data assets you can get access to that will create unique value around your area of expertise. Or your unique ability to bring data together to train these systems to create outputs that you can monetize.