Will the Term AI Have Any Marketing Value in 5 Years?
I have long suspected AI as a term will go the way of the Cloud
This week, several people asked me what I believe will happen with AI in the future. My usual answers include OpenAI no longer existing as a company and the term AI becoming so watered down and meaningless that it won’t have any major market impact beyond being a technology descriptor.
In this sense, the term AI refers to the technological method used to achieve the result produced by a particular app or process. This is no different than the way the Cloud went from being a major technological movement dominating tech and business conversations, to becoming a basic descriptor for how data is stored.
Why do I think this will happen to AI, given the neverending hype?
1) AI Has a Negative Marketing Impact
While I've always thought the term was unfortunate, given its negative dystopian portrayal in science fiction, the last four years of inflated hype and other marketing mistakes, such as promising mass job displacement, have worn thin with the public. They see the technology in a negative light now, meaning that tools marketed as AI-centric create buying friction rather than acceleration.
2) Big Money Drives AI… For Now
Given that the AI trend still has big-money investments fueling it, it’s unlikely that negative public views of AI will cause the term to be used less, at least in the short term. However, now that SpaceX is public and the coming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs will finally be completed, that may change.
We’re going to get a much better look at their numbers and how much money they are making or losing. As already intimated above, the company I see as the big loser in such disclosures is OpenAI. Keep in mind, they are already soliciting government investments, which many see as bailouts.
Investor enthusiasm will likely wane as the high costs of operating inefficient LLMs meet market buying reality. Never underestimate the power of profit and loss as a motivating factor in business. Investors will demand better results, and that will surely cause companies to focus more on their value proposition for businesses rather than the fact that they produce AI algorithms.
Does that mean AI goes away? Hardly, but smaller, domain-specific models will become preferred where applicable, and newer, more efficient and less costly model architectures built to serve general consumer-grade AI will surely rise as well.
3) Most Don’t Understand, More Don’t Care
So now you have negative public sentiment and lower investor enthusiasm, with higher pressure to produce results. Software companies will be forced to reckon with the brutal reality that most people don’t really understand what AI is. Most think it’s a chat box that talks back to them, as opposed to an algorithm designed to perform a task.
Worse, more don’t care. See, the problem with marketing technology as AI is that it doesn’t produce a specific result. That’s what people care about. This is true whether the buyer is an enterprise procurement team, a small business owner, or a consumer.
The real issue is whether or not the product, service, or process does what it promised to do. How’s the quality? Is it reliable? That’s what people care about.
Candidly, given LLM performance over the past few years, marketing an offering as AI does not help the quality and reliability trust factors. Add the negative opinion of how AI will impact society, and you have a double whammy. This can actually get worse if the economic fallout from overinvestment produces a recession.
No one really knows exactly what will happen, but I think the larger point holds regardless of the specifics of this particular trend. In the end, whether or not AI is used to produce software or some other kind of product or service, means much less to the buyer until the result is achieved.
And that is ultimately why I think the term AI is not much more than a descriptor for how something works in the not-too-distant future.