This year’s World Congress is over and it’s time to talk about mobile phones. Well and from the newcomer – already ubiquitous ChatGPT. These promises…
At my age and always close to the technological world, I was lucky to see and experience a few distractions in the country. ChatGPT, and the neural network-based generative AI capability that supports it, is a major disruptive technology in the making.
Since the smartphone is the latest disruption of a similar scale, to analyze, as I told you at the beginning, we have analyzed three lessons from the rise of the smartphone and the business implications for ChatGPT and generative AI in general.
First come sustainable innovations;
The first smartphones were used for use cases that supported existing businesses that could easily see and use the value of the technology. Email and calendars were integrated, messaging services were added, and phone manufacturers made payments to mobile networks. Market penetration paths were well established and business partners did not need much persuasion or new techniques to use the new medium. Knowing that the development cycle would be short in the next few machines, they thought that they could repeat themselves in the business of modern models: by keeping innovating it was better to go.
Over time, more companies began to incorporate smartphones into their systems, for example portals for banking technology based on WAP technology before they became applications… I still remember my beloved Timeport!, or marketing based on images sent with text messages. text
They didn’t change their core businesses, but the smartphone dictated another way to access their services. Legacy companies dominated these arenas, in part because their roles were closely tied to Internet assets. New entrants could expand by providing services to these companies, for example by providing technology for marketing treatments to adapt their campaigns to the mobile format.
And what does this mean for ChatGPT? Well, we can imagine that sustainable use cases are being used quickly, from finding customer services, through research itself. This will create, for example, great innovations in customer experience.
Disruption:
I had the opportunity to become the CEO of Psion through a good friend who was on the team that worked on his smartphone. The purpose is clear: ‘to build a machine that stands out from its competitors in certain functions,’ for the fact that it has done many things more or less well. That bell ring device? No? There must be reason. In the end, all the old smartphones gave it a shot, until Blackberry put a priority on messaging. All this is not quite noticeable. Not even a basketball player.
Within a few years, basic camera phones began to appear. They couldn’t match a digital camera or film. But those available for present and immediate use are taken. Mobile networks became fast enough to support video downloads, and web-based video quickly broke down. The list of affected sectors has grown over time and continues to grow today. After disruptive innovation norms, successful companies were rarely those that dominated the Internet, although there were notable exceptions of companies that aggressively pursued their own business models and were mobile-friendly, such as Google and the adoption of Android, among many other smart measures.
ChatGPT and its competitors still have many imperfections, so they don’t directly impact other parts. But as Clay M. Christensen discovered in his study, what starts out bad usually gets better. Generative AI doesn’t need to respond to most traditional behavioral tasks, it just needs to satisfy some rude users first.
New markets flourish;
The smartphone took time to cover new areas. In the case, for example, of the first mobile marketing or mobile e-commerce companies, many potential customers were interested in the technology, but were reluctant to adopt it until they saw others using it and demonstrated its reliability and usefulness. Yes, that’s right. The opening of the new market needs several things if we are to reach its full potential, and early advocates beware. We can validate and test, but the real money comes down to material time. Patience… and lung, harvest, persevere!
And so the first to arrive is usually of much benefit. Uber and the Match Group (yes, and their subsidiaries, such as Tinder) … struck a big gap against their competitors, being among the first in their respective categories to use smartphones. Sometimes they relied on sheer weapon presence and then quickly bolted to aim for the first mobile.
Returning to generative AI, certainly new potential markets are beginning to appear, in fields as diverse as analyzing data and creating unique images. ChatGPT is likely to enable new business models. Consulting sessions with an automaton? Business presentations controlled by network robots? the possibilities are endless. Yes, we will see many become rich as they establish themselves in these new markets… and we will also see how important barriers to entry are naturally created.
In his book The Innovator’s Solution, Clay M. Christensen, which I discussed earlier, uses business history to reveal the dynamics of sustainable business, disruption, and new market innovations. We see these patterns repeated across all sectors and especially in the most turbulent cases. Our beloved ChatGPT is no exception. Ready?
