Company Building in the Curiosity Phase of AI
Navigating go-to-market, product, and customer development during the most dangerous phase of an emerging category
Head to my blog for the full post with footnotes.
If you’re on twitter these days you have likely seen a wave of videos that utilize things like Stable Diffusion for fun and novel product concepts/demos. This is happening now that designers have had the requisite time to mess around in DreamStudio or Dall-E, talk to engineers to understand what is possible, and spin up concept art.
This reminds me a lot of prior concept-heavy phases of AR and VR including the launch of Google Glass (we all remember this video), Magic Leap, Spectacles, and more. These concepts were fun the first time you watched them and lost luster over the subsequent viewings as we all litigated how much we really would use a given use-case (all while ignoring the UX of using the actual hardware).
Unfortunately, the steady flow of twitter retweets and likes led the AR/VR community to get too focused on fun use-cases versus high-value utility that people repeatedly wanted.
Now that we have composability of AI models, there is a new wave of AI-first products/features making their way into the world. These effective demos will likely lead to a barrage of AI-first products that see high short-term usage followed by material churn, driven by the collective curiosity of a variety of industries.
The Curiosity Phase
We’re currently in what I’d call the Curiosity Phase (or less eloquently the“everyone wants to try it” phase) of AI. We can view this as a third mainstream go round for AI, after the world was introduced to Siri/Alexa and shocked by People That Do Not Exist.
The Curiosity Phase manifests itself when a technology has abstracted away some of the layers so that a wider base of users can try it, while still having a very open-ended view of what the highest value things to do with said technology is or what core product primitives should be. Some may think of this as fitting within Carlotta Perez's core frameworks, others may look at this from a technology deployment perspective, while one could also put this moment on the traditional Hype Cycle chart. We can argue about the specifics but what's important to understand is the speculative fervor around use-cases and value creation that comes with the Curiosity Phase.
Now that AI has started to proliferate into specific industries with real value creation, the curiosity is growing even stronger…