AI PREDICTIONS || Why the Big Players Will Emerge Victorious and Small Entities May Struggle
The dynamic landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has significantly altered the equation for businesses large and small.
The leading firms are swiftly integrating AI capabilities into their existing suites, offering enhanced value and convenience to their users. This article explores how these developments may impact different segments in the market and the potential strategies for smaller entities to stay competitive.
Big Tech's AI Integration
Adobe Creative Suite's Photoshop has recently integrated Generative AI, incorporating Adobe Firefly. This allows users to manipulate images with astonishing ease and precision using natural language prompts. Adobe Firefly's generative AI tool can now be accessed through Photoshop via it’s Generative Fill tool, enabling creators to add content, remove or replace parts of an image, and extend the edges of an image with this innovative new feature. We showed this tool in action in last week’s Business Story discussing the pros and cons of using AI tools. The capabilities of Photoshop’s Generative AI might soon expand to emulate image creation abilities initially available through Stability AI plugins and Midjourney.
OpenAI has released the official ChatGPT app on the iOS store, following a flurry of unofficial apps utilizing ChatGPT technology. The new app is free to use, syncs history across devices, and integrates Whisper, OpenAI's speech-recognition system. This launch outshines the unofficial apps and provides users with exclusive access to GPT-4's capabilities and faster response times.
SaaS Companies and AI
Major companies like Salesforce, Bain & Company, Snap, Quizlet, Instacart, and Shopify have already started integrating AI functions into their products and services. They're using technologies like ChatGPT to create generative AI for customer relation management tools, provide conversation summaries, research tools, writing assistance, answer open-ended questions, power shopping assistants, and even function as a one-on-one tutor.
Challenges for Small Entities
Smaller entities, initially quick to leverage AI to boost productivity and profitability, now face challenges as larger players integrate these functions directly into their products. To retain subscribers and stay relevant, these entities will need to deliver added value beyond the capabilities of larger firms. As businesses prefer to keep traffic and subscribers to themselves, sharing revenues and profits with plug-ins becomes less appealing. The launch of the official ChatGPT app effectively crushed the smaller guys that were piggybacking on the tech with API integrations.
Who will be the runaway winner in the AI race?
Here’s how I calculate my investment into AI tools to enhance my day-to-day workflow and creative process. The Adobe Creative Suite subscription costs approximately $80 per month. With Adobe integrating AI functionalities similar to those offered by smaller tools, users could save on subscriptions to tools like Autopod ($20/month), Midjourney ($60/month), and Stability AI (you buy credits so there’s no set monthly cost). The cost of these additional subscriptions could be reduced or eliminated entirely if these functions are consolidated into Adobe's platform. In addition, through Adobe, the monthly cost gets me a full suite of creative apps instead of one-off features.
Running these numbers is what spurred my prediction that the big players will emerge victorious from the AI race while smaller players will struggle to turn a profit; because when faced with tough competition from established players, you either come up with something entirely new and adds a ton of value, or lower your prices to entice and keep subscribers. How do you think this will pan out?
The Default AI Choice
The race between Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT for the 'Default AI Choice' title is worth noting. After testing out both platforms, Bard is the obvious winner when it comes to generating responses that rely on search results and web content. Given that the quality of AI-generated responses relies heavily on having fast and accurate access to information online, Bard seems to be the contender to become the default AI platform of choice. In this case, users may save some money on their monthly ChatGPT subscription.
Google has an incentive to offer Bard for free to keep users on their platform. Bard has already integrated search results into its responses and incorporates visuals (which ChatGPT currently does not offer). Thus, unless Microsoft can bolster Bing's performance and its integration with ChatGPT, Bard could become the default AI of choice. This is like picking your default browser, once users make a selection, it’ll be hard to get them to change. Currently, I use both tools: Bard for search-based prompts and ChatGPT for content generation prompts because it seems to be a better storyteller.
In Summary…
The rapid advancement of AI technology has created a paradigm shift in how businesses operate. Big players are incorporating AI into their existing product suites, potentially eclipsing smaller entities. These smaller businesses now face the task of delivering added value to stay competitive. As we continue this wild ride, it will be fascinating to observe the evolving strategies businesses employ to leverage AI technology.
