AI is not the next DotCom bubble, it’s just the next layer of life and business themselves

#ai #softwaredevelopment #technology

Check our Medium page to read the original article: https://luisyanguas22.medium.com/ai-is-not-the-next-dotcom-bubble-its-just-the-next-layer-of-life-and-business-themselves-8bec867f0317

Every IT professional or amateur about its 30’s probably have noticed that every few years a new technology, more or less revolutionary, arrives with enormous promises. The industry gets suddenly excited and a new hype comes along, with companies raising absurd amounts of money and people all around raising predictions that everything is about to change. But normally most of these episodes end up with someone interpreting and saying that the new hype is just another dotCom bubble.

As well as many of the readers of this article, as of 6th October 26 I don’t think that is what is happening with artificial intelligence and everything around it, and the reason for it comes from a vast amount of angles from business to routinary life itself. And while I agree there may be companies whose valuations are unrealistic and there will certainly be AI projects that fail, products that disappear and ideas that turn out to be much less useful than their creators expected, the technology itself is not going away and is here to stay forever. For good and for bad. And that fact is incredibly important for businesses as well as for anyone to adapt it’s life to the change.

The internet went through something similar in the late 90’s, and many peers above their 40’s will remember how when many companies put that “.com” in their names, investors became excited about almost anything involving the web, and enormous amounts of money were invested in businesses that ultimately disappeared. And yes, the bubble burst, but the internet didn’t disappear, quite the opposite. In fact, twenty years later it actually became extremely difficult to imagine running a serious business without it.

I believe AI is heading in a similar direction, although the transformation in our opinion will be even more personal because while internet changed how we communicate, shop, work and consume information, AI is beginning to change how we think, how we create, how we decide and how we interact with technology. And unlike the internet, AI doesn’t necessarily require us to open a browser or learn a new application. It can slowly become part of the tools we already use, and that is a huge differentiator.

In our present world, and in the near future, our whole life and our daily routines will be different…Our email will summarize our messages, our car will anticipate our route, our bank will detect unusual activity, our doctor may use AI to analyze information, our phone will help organize our entire day and most of our companies will use AI to forecast demand, answer customers, analyze documents, write software or make operational decisions. And eventually, we may stop thinking about many of these things as “AI features” and will start understanding them as simply part of everyday life…And that is both exciting and slightly uncomfortable.

Technology in fact becomes particularly powerful when we stop noticing it. Electricity is a good example of it. Nobody talks about the electricity powering their laptop while they are reading this article because electricity is simply there. The exact same could and will probably happen soon with artificial intelligence.
The question for individuals is therefore not whether AI will affect their lives (it will almost certainly will) but the more useful question is whether they will understand enough about it to make good decisions.

And in the midst of all this change, you don’t need to become an AI researcher or even understand how every large language model works, but you probably should understand what AI is good at, where it makes mistakes, what information it should not be given and how it can change the way you work. Those things are truly important. And the same happens for companies, in fact it may be even more important from the moment we understand that for a business, adopting AI should not mean just adding a chatbot to the website and declaring victory.
The real opportunity is much bigger because AI can simply change how a company operates by doing things unthinkable some years ago as automating repetitive processes, helping employees make better decisions, improving customer services, analyzing large amounts of information, optimizing operations and creating entirely new products and services.

But there is a catch in all of this because AI works best when it is connected to the business itself, and while a generic AI tool knows a lot about the world, it doesn’t necessarily know how your company works, your customers, your internal processes, your legacy systems, your pricing rules, your operational constraints or the thousands of small decisions your employees make every day. That is where the next phase of digital transformation becomes particularly interesting.

For any company to sail properly the future business environment, the secret may not simply be that those companies use the most advanced AI models. Instead, it will become almost mandatory that companies do their best job at connecting AI with their existing software, data and business processes, and this is why we believe the coming years will be less about “implementing AI” and more about redesigning businesses around what AI makes possible.

In the near future we imagine, some companies will use AI to make their existing processes faster while others will realize that they can completely redesign those processes, and a smaller number will discover that AI allows them to offer something that wasn’t economically possible before. That is where business models start to change.

Imagine a logistics company that doesn’t simply use AI to predict delivery times, but builds an operation where software continuously evaluates capacity, traffic, customer priorities and costs and recommends the best decisions. Or a financial company that doesn’t simply automate document processing, but creates a service that can analyze thousands of documents almost instantly. Try to visualise a manufacturer that moves from selling a physical product to selling a combination of the product, software, data and predictive services around it…
These are not technology projects in the traditional sense but they are business transformation projects, and this is where I think companies need to be careful because the biggest risk is not adopting AI too quickly but adopting it without understanding what it means for the business, because buying tools is easy but changing processes or changing a business model is harder.

Companies therefore need to start asking uncomfortable questions to themselves…What could our business look like if AI removed half of the repetitive work? What would our customers expect from us if our competitors became significantly faster? Which parts of our business depend on human decisions and which parts are simply legacy processes? What information do we have that could become more valuable when combined with AI? And perhaps the most important question: If we were starting our business today, knowing what AI can do, would we build it in the same way?

Nobody knows exactly what the next ten years will look like and we really think anyone who claims otherwise is probably selling something, but we don’t need to predict the future perfectly, we just need to prepare for a world that is clearly moving in a particular direction, and any of us can easily see how AI is becoming part of how people work, communicate, travel, learn, buy, sell and make decisions. Nobody can deny this.

For individuals, we think the smartest response is curiosity and hunger for knowledge, and for companies the almost unique answer is adaptation. The businesses that thrive in this new era won’t necessarily be those that adopt every new AI tool but the ones that understand their own business deeply enough to recognize where AI can genuinely create an advantage. And that requires more than technology.
It requires people who can look at a business, understand its processes, systems and customers, and work out where technology can fundamentally change the equation.

Because the AI era is not something that is coming but something that has already started, and the question is whether you will be among those shaping that change or among those trying to catch up with it.

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AI is not the next DotCom bubble, it’s just the next layer of life and business themselves

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