Spending an Evening with the Generative AI Community

Last week was a short week as we had a bank holiday here in Belgium.

Would a founder have anything better to do than to end that week with an interesting meetup? Short answer: "no" (of course not).

The topic: generative AI (all the rage, I know, I'm a hipster like that ??).

On stage in the cellars of a historic printing house in Ghent, a group of young start-up CTOs shared how they were integrating generative AI into their products. The ones I was personally most interested in: "Bizzy" and "Dealside." Why? My own background is in "sales" and these two start-ups promise to make that profession a whole lot easier.

How?

In a nutshell:

• Bizzy tackles the pain of building spot-on prospect lists (identify the "right target").
• Dealside's mission is potentially even bigger: to build an encompassing "sales assistant."

What does generative AI have to do with all this?

For Bizzy, generative AI is about enriching prospect data and working with LLMs (large language models) in order to make the right connections. For example: you want to target startups who raised funding - so you need to connect newspaper articles to the name of the startups (avoiding confusion with companies in other industries who happen to hold a similar name). For Dealside, it is about being able to interpret natural language as sales reps use it in CRM systems.

Main takeaways from my evening:

1. A lot of experimentation is going on with generative AI.
2. Crunching large language models can assist human beings by connecting dots that might not have been obvious from the start.
3. For AI-SaaS particularly: there will be a race to become king of the hill. Competitors in that race will have to be many times faster than the previous generation of SaaS founders ever needed to be (and that was already incredibly fast). You can count on it that this will have a human toll on the people building those companies.
4. Hallucinations of AI models can be kept in check if precautionary measures are taken from the start. Adamant testing will be key.