Chances are, you’ve already interacted with a chatbot when you tried to contact a retailer about your online order—and the experience may or may not have been frustrating. Chatbots are perhaps the biggest use cases for companies to use artificial intelligence (AI); an estimated 58% of companies doing business with other businesses (B2B) and 42% of companies selling to consumers (B2C) now ‘employ’ chatbot assistants to interact with customers. 66% of global financial firms have adopted a chatbot to help customers with online transactions, and the chatbot market in the healthcare industry (talk to AI rather than a doctor or nurse) will surpass $543 million in 2027.
And then there’s the generative language models, including Chat GPT, Google’s Bard, DeepMind’s Gopher and Alpha there are Fold, Meta’s LLaMA, Claude from Anthropic and, well, there are an estimated 14,700 artificial intelligence startups in the U.S. alone—and their cumulative market share includes roughly half of all Americans who use digital assistants currently.
The point of all this is that AI is no longer a technology of the future; it’s deeply embedded in our day-to-day lives. But at the same time, it’s one of those technologies that is hard to invest in; there is no easy way to know which of the major players will outcompete which others, or whether artificial intelligence technology will eventually be evenly distributed, like the Internet, across thousands of companies, with nobody owning significant market share and, therefore, outsized profits.
People with very long memories, and market historians, will note that in the 1980s, something new was introduced: it was called software, to be run on the fancy new thinking machines called computers. Some of the leading names of the era were Ashton-Tate (database software), Lotus (spreadsheets), Tandy and Coleco (computers)—and, well, many other companies that you have probably never heard of, because they went out of business despite having, at one time, a huge market share lead on the competition. We still have software, and like AI, it’s a big part of our lives. We don’t have all the early pioneers in the software technology, and 10 or 20 years out, we probably won’t remember some of the AI pioneers that loom so large today.
