A New Productivity Revolution Is Underway
Every revolution in human history, at its core, has created a fundamental shift in productivity. The agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the digital revolution led to the development of new tools and technologies that enabled people to work more efficiently and produce more goods and services in less time.
The agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago led to a transition from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled communities, thanks to tools like plows and irrigation systems that increased food production 100-1000 times, leading to the growth of cities, civilizations, and modern society.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the industrial revolution brought about the widespread use of machines and automation in manufacturing, leading to increased productivity, and transforming the global economy. The invention of the steam engine, spinning jenny, and other machines allowed for faster, cheaper, and greater production of goods.
The current digital revolution is similarly driven by the development of new tools and technologies that boost our productivity and are transforming the way we live and work.
As the digital revolution continues to unfold and we enter the new age of A.I, we can expect to see even more significant advances in productivity. The development of new technologies revolving around A.I will enable us to work more efficiently on a scale never before experienced.
By democratizing access to A.I via a chat interface, OpenA.I achieved the fastest rate of adoption of any technology in history, reaching 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million in a short 2 months.
By comparison, TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 million users, and Instagram about 2.5 years, according to UBS researcher Lloyd Walmsley.
n 20 years following the Internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app," Reuters quotes Walmsley as writing in the UBS note.
The reason for this explosion in adoption is two-fold:
As the first public-access A.I tool is a language model, the first industry that will be affected the most will be the digital content industry, particularly text-based solutions.
A.I. has the potential to create massive disruption on an unprecedented scale. Though daunting, this presents tremendous opportunities for companies that can integrate and utilize the technology well. Doing this right can bring immense growth as the ability to scale massively with little effort and cost enables product and service providers to create more value for customers than ever before in history.
Prediction on a Macro Scale
The Future of Business Competition: How A.I. Will Force Companies to Evolve
The race to gain a strong position in the age of A.I. is already on. Big corporates like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook will leverage A.I. as a tool for acquiring customers. They will rush to bring tools to market quickly and make access to A.I. free in order to win market share early on. Unlike previous significant events in history, which were localized before slowly spreading internationally over a span of years, user adoption will take place almost overnight on a global scale, primarily across developed countries, via the web.
We’ve already had a taste of the speed of adoption of A.I. technologies, first with Chat GPT and then with Microsoft’s beta signup for their new AI-integrated Bing browser, which garnered over 1 million signups in just 48 hours.
This drastic change at the global corporate level, coupled with the unprecedented speed of user adoption on a global scale, will change the business landscape all the way to the local level in a relatively short period of time.?
The Rise of Intelligent Competition: Why Companies Must Embrace Change to Remain Relevant
Up until now, humans had to think, then do the work. A person’s output accrued a cost: time, effort, and money. Soon they only need to think; A.I. will do the work.?
Moreover, A.I. drives down the cost of output to near zero. This shifts the focus from increasing productivity to increasing scale, as traditional limitations, such as time, effort, and monetary cost, are no longer determining factors in output potential.?
Skill and productivity will revolve around the ability to think better than competitors. End users’ expectations of software to shift dramatically from the current expectation of a modest 2x or 3x boost in productivity to a massive 100x output with A.I.
This opens up unprecedented opportunities for companies that embrace the A.I. revolution and are able to deliver tools that help people make better and more well-informed decisions, and puts those who resist the change at a significant competitive disadvantage.
Companies will compete on their ability to make better decisions to guide A.I. to produce predictable outcomes. This leads to the demand for data analytic tools to help them make better decisions.?
Ultimately, companies that build better prompts will always have the edge.
The Growing Demand for A.I. Skills and Knowledge
People will compete on their ability to utilize A.I. Intelligence is no longer a competitive factor. One’s ability to use A.I. to create faster, more accurate and scalable output will determine status.
There will be a huge demand from individuals and businesses to learn how to utilize A.I. for their specific needs, but also to gain a commercial edge as one’s ability to use A.I. effectively becomes the way individuals are valued in a business context.?
How A.I. Will Change the Economics of Software Application Development
Software building costs will go down as developers use A.I. to build products faster with less effort. This will lower the barrier to entry for software development. As a result, the competition in B2C software will become more intense as users have more options to choose from, pushing producers to compete on price. Scaling will become increasingly challenging in this sector.
Focusing on serving the enterprise space continues to be the best short-to-medium-term bet in the evolving technology landscape.?
Enterprise-level solutions often require significant investment and more complexity, making the barrier to entry higher for competitors.?
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Moreover, enterprises are willing to pay a premium for software that can address their unique requirements, offering a more sustainable revenue stream.?
Developing enterprise-level software also provides opportunities for building long-term relationships with clients, resulting in recurring revenue through other potential tools and services.?
Placing Our Bets: What This Means to us in Particular, and The Digital Content Industry in General
The digital content industry will be the first to feel the heat. Chat GPT was the catalyst. The disruption phase of A.I. will bring about great uncertainty and change. But, as with previous revolutions, this will also be a great time to make big bets to end up on the right side of history. The players who take the right actions faster during this period will reap huge returns, while those slower to act will be left behind.
Companies will experience a huge shift in their expectation of software systems. In the past, the expectation was for software to help increase staff productivity by 2- 3 times. Now, the expectation will be for software to help staff utilize A.I. in order to increase output by 100x - 1000x fold.?
We used to make software for humans. Now we need to think about making software to help humans utilize A.I.
As users gain free or affordable access to A.I., relatively simple tools like Chat GPT will become the norm. Therefore, software that solves simple problems (like Jasper or copy.ai) will become obsolete.?
There will be 3 levels of utilization:
As for WriterZen , we will have to truly rethink how A.I. will reshape search behavior and user expectations, and learn to integrate A.I. as a key (strategic) part of our solution to help our customers maximize their ability to utilize A.I
We will continue doubling down on course offerings to help users around the world learn about A.I. and how to utilize it. Our aim will be to meet and serve the growing user demand for skills and knowledge around A.I. The faster and larger our course library, the higher the chance we have to win traffic to the site and turn it into an effective GTM strategy.
We will also focus on developing future-generation features to help enterprises/businesses produce more output with less input through integration with A.I. at different levels (text, image, music, voice).?
Last but not least, is ZenInsights, a project which we have been working on in the last 6 months focusing on helping businesses around the world make sense of search engine data, providing actionable insights to help them make better business decisions.
Conclusion
A.I. will be the next revolution, whether we like it or not. Like previous revolutions, this is an incredible opportunity to grow. If we fail to take action, we will miss the train.
History is littered with examples of companies that paid the price of nonconformity.
The Nuneaton Harborough & District Tramways Company was a tramway service operating in the UK in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, the company was a profitable and successful enterprise, relying on horse-drawn trams to provide transportation services.?
However, with the advent of the industrial revolution, new technologies such as electric trams and automobiles emerged and quickly gained popularity.
Despite these changes, the Nuneaton Harborough & District Tramways Company failed to adapt and continued to operate its horse-drawn trams. This resulted in a decline in their customer base as people opted for faster, more efficient modes of transportation.?
The company's unwillingness to embrace new technologies ultimately led to its extinction, as it was unable to compete with its competitors and could not sustain its operations.
Kodak was once a giant in the photography industry, renowned for its film cameras and film rolls. However, in the digital age, the company struggled to adapt to the changing technological landscape.?
Kodak was slow to transition from film to digital photography. By the time the company started investing in digital technology, it was already facing stiff competition from newer players who had already established a strong presence in the market.
Kodak's management made a number of missteps, such as cutting R&D spending and focusing too much on its traditional film business even as the digital photography market was growing rapidly.
The photography market was disrupted by new players such as Canon, Nikon, and Sony, who introduced digital cameras with better features and lower prices.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
These stories serve as cautionary tales about the importance of adaptation and innovation in the face of change and disruption. It highlights the need for companies to continuously assess and respond to the changing market and technological landscape in order to remain competitive and relevant.
Making the right bets to develop features that align with the new demands (scale output, less cost per input) will be the key to winning market share.
Time is of the essence as everyone is jumping on the boat. Half of the Y-incubator batch this year is doing something chat-GPT-related.
This heralds a new era of provisioning unparalleled value for the masses, at a level never seen before. We literally get to invent the future. From now.
By: Daniel Nguyen , They Call Me Hoz