Mobile Apps to GenAI Apps to GenYELP

Not long ago, many naysayers, including yours truly did not believe that the hoi polloi (read non-nerdy commoners) would open hundreds of apps on their phones, each with its own password/authentication protocol, to cater to their various needs. But wonder of wonders, people took to apps like a fish to water.

As I look at how GenAI is progressing, a similar scenario may emerge, where we will have a GenAI app for very many different tasks. Companies/GenAI app developers, will create “custom GenAI apps” that will cater to the various needs of people. There will be two kinds of apps: -

1.??? Apps that will help improve individual productivity – GenAI Personal

2.??? Apps that will help at enterprise level for corporates – GenAI Corporate

There will be a few, where the lines will be blurred, in terms of where they should be categorized (perhaps in both places), but for the purpose of this article, we will keep it simple and not repeat the placement of the apps in both categories.

Somebody created this nice-looking chart (header of this article), about a couple of months ago, categorizing the GenAI applications that are out there/or are in the process of development. We can simply pick this up and start categorizing them into the 2 groups – GenAI personal and GenAI Corporate.

GenAI Personal –

Vizcom turns your sketches into stunning concept drawings in seconds. Though I would think that this App could find its place in both Personal and Corporate, but it has dozens of use cases in both categories.

Vizard - Easy to build immersive, interactive VR applications that solve real-world research and business challenges. Students and researchers can use this apart from corporates.

Aragon is an AI-powered tool that helps generate multiple professional headshots featuring different styles based on random, personal photos

Lensa – Photo editing app that creates Magic Avatars

?

GenAI Corporate –

Diagram - is a platform that powers UI design through generative AI. Diagram offers tools to improve the creative lives of designers at companies like Uber, Netflix, Meta, etc.

Poly - building the next generation of voice assistants capable of handling true human-level conversations in customer service.

Dall – E2 - text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts".

CALA - is the leading fashion supply chain interface that unifies design, development, production, and logistics into a single, digital platform. CALA's algorithms can determine pricing based on how many units you want, incorporating the price of materials, labour, shipping, and even taxes.

Doing this categorization will take a lot of time, both for the writer as well as the reader. But I am sure, we get the drift by now!

So, let’s move on to other important aspects on this topic.

How can all of these Apps be organized and made available to consumers in a single place?

The answer is a GenAI Play store. The same rules of the app stores for mobile apps will apply.

GenAI play stores will come into play, where consumers can download the GenAI app they would like to use. And there will be enterprise grade GenAI which vendors will sell, similar to the more complicated B2B apps that are sold separately to corporates and are not available for public download. Which companies will own the GenAI play stores – again the usual suspects – Google, Microsoft, Apple and perhaps Meta for GenAI personal. For GenAI Corporate though, there may be other companies that can rule the roost for self-serve GenAI Corporate Apps. The others would need to be custom deployed just like we have custom software deployments for more enterprise grade software applications. For example, in the field of Analytics/Data Science, various players are trying to figure out what Apps they should be developing so that they can stand apart from the rest.

Many people believe that the high cost of computing will be a barrier to adoption and proliferation. But Moore’s law has proven that speed and cost of computing continue to reduce exponentially and should not be a problem in a few years’ time. Though, there is a growing rabble of thought that says that Moore’s law is no longer valid, and we have reached a point of saturation where similar rate of progress in computing and storage will no longer be possible.

When you have a problem of plenty like this, the biggest problem is that there will be many competing apps and it will take time for the reviews to kick in and for apps to establish themselves as the undisputed leaders in their field of application. For the apps in the category of GenAI Personal apps, how to generate revenue will also be a key question. And how to do it without advertisements and without affecting the consumer experience.

But with the profusion of GenAI apps that are popping up, a YELP (which publishes crowd sourced reviews for businesses) for GenAI cannot be ruled out. We will need crowd sourced reviews to help us select the GenAI Personal Apps that we would want to use. The “how” to use the apps and the individual reviews from users on how and for what purpose they have used it for, will become even more significant, as each App can have varied applications that the creators of the apps would themselves have not been able to imagine. Maybe this super app will be called GenYELP.

Till then, let’s enjoy the Gen AI ride.