Exponential Era
Over the past few weeks, I have been meeting various CxOs – both customers and prospects. Even as they are engaged in “business as usual”, there is a growing realisation that there are “big technology dislocations” (in the words of Andrew Chen) underway. The question I get asked: AI will change business operations and customer interactions, but how? What is it that they should be doing?
I tell them that this is one of those decadal or generational “make-or-break” moments that come in every industry. Winners of the past may not dominate the future if they don’t make the transformations necessary. And vice versa: there is an opportunity to grow market share and profits if the right decisions can be made early on.
I tell them the story of the early years of the Internet that I lived through and was an active player in. The “dotcom” revolution meant that businesses had to build their digital presence and reimagine what it meant to operate in a connected world where geography was no longer a barrier for commerce. By building the IndiaWorld family of website from an office in Mumbai, I was reaching out to Indians globally. In a matter of a few years, I had built the largest digital media company with a reach in the millions via sites like Samachar, Khoj, Khel, and Bawarchi. This was something simply not possible via the traditional platforms of print and TV. The Internet brought forth new businesses and new business models, creating new winners – and losers – in the process. What was even more exciting was the second-generation of Internet businesses that came in after the dotcom bust in the early 2000s.
India experienced a similar boom in the past 5-7 years with the launch of Jio which commoditised high-speed Internet access via the mobile, the influx of cheap Chinese smartphones, and the launch of UPI for digital payments. Availability of venture capital also helped fuel the rise of startups and made it a golden era of experimentation. While many ventures failed, the ones that survive (due to a combination of luck and smarts) are the ones that lead the revolution.
OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 is bringing forth a similar upheaval. While these are still early days, the exponential pace of change is seeing a level of innovation which we have not experienced before. A new generation of LLMs comes every few months. Thousands of startups have hundreds of billions of funding to build out the new future. From a New York Times article in late April: “Investors have poured $330 billion into about 26,000 A.I. and machine-learning start-ups over the past three years, according to PitchBook, which tracks the industry. That’s two-thirds more than the amount they spent funding 20,350 A.I. companies from 2018 through 2020.”
In this frenzy, what should businesses do? And how should they go about doing it? What can they do to maintain or gain a competitive advantage in tomorrow’s world? These are the questions I try and answer in my CxO conversations. In this essay, I have crafted a “CEO Memo” which addresses both the “what” and the “how” by looking ahead to the next stage of the AI revolution and how businesses can make the right moves to win the growth and profits battle – what I have termed as the “Profipoly Quest”. [See The Profipoly Quest and The Profipoly Quest: Maya’s Story].
