AI Apps Under Threat

How Do You Know What to Use?

Image courtesy DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT 4

Today, I’d like to share some observations about the state of AI apps. Much is being published about this in blogs, podcasts, and journalistic articles. But if you don’t happen to follow the latest AI news, you might be unaware of the changes and their implications.

My synopsis of the year that’s been 2023 in AI is this:

• Q1: ChatGPT set the world on fire
• Q2: A ton of tech entrepreneurs hatched apps based on ChatGPT (or similar AI tech) as quickly as they could spin up a web domain. Users reached for shiny toys (“there’s an AI for that”!) left and right, or just sat it out.
• Q3: Existing software vendors started to follow, announcing AI features left and right. Users started to get the idea that AI is here to stay; curiosity drove more experimentation with both AI features and leading apps.
• Q4: The future is becoming more clear …. Lots of quickly released AI apps will disappear, replaced by those few new winning apps and replaced by features built into our favorite tools.

This is highly oversimplified, but it gives you the gist of things to come. More AI in the software you’ve used in the past and use today. Coalescence around a few new AI tools. And simply more use of AI across the board, but in fewer tools. The major apps will be sharks swimming through a sea of fish, gobbling them up as they grow bigger and better.

Example: Meeting Note Takers

I’ll illustrate this sea of change with the software category of meeting note takers, one that wasn’t even a “thing” just a year ago.

Shortly after generative AI became available to developers, a bunch of software entrepreneurs created a new category, and the competition ensued. Apps such as Fireflies, Rewatch, Fathom, and Otter.ai fought for share of this new market. Software comparison sites such as G2 and Capterra quickly created comparisons of the apps. Companies and individuals who were enamored with the idea of automatically receiving meeting transcripts, synopses, action item lists, and more hurried to try them out. Many took the plunge to subscribe.

During and after the pandemic, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet became the “big 3” of virtual meeting platforms. The meeting note-taker apps all touted seamless integration with the platforms.

It was just a matter of time…

Zoom’s leading the charge, with its AI Companion, providing the core note-taking features at no extra cost to its subscribers. The AI-powered capabilities provided by all of those apps released earlier in the year have become competitive differentiators for the meeting platforms, with Zoom out in front at the moment.

Where Does This Leave You?

What’s happening in the software market with AI apps and features, such as note-taking for virtual meetings, should change the way that you approach any investments in applications.

If you’re looking for a new package (e.g., a new donor database), you should include the vendor’s AI strategy in your evaluation. Those that are slow to add AI capabilities to their systems are likely to lose revenues down the road; you’d need a compelling reason to choose to adopt one of those now.

And for shiny AI toys (i.e., specialized apps) that you’re considering, it’s worth pondering whether their features will be baked into some existing package you’re already vested in using. If so, you may want to wait to see if your vendor adds those capabilities, rather than adding a new app to your world. The Zoom AI Companion is an example of this possible scenario — figuring out how to use Zoom’s note-taking is likely to be much simpler than learning and adopting a specialized tool.

The Bottom Line

If you thought that picking software or deciding when to change was daunting in the past, sorry to tell you, it’s just become much more complicated. I wish I could share a magic wand (AI-powered, of course) to make decisions easier, but it’s a really complicated environment and is likely to stay that way for awhile.

There are really wonderful possibilities with this burgeoning AI-powered world, as well as many risks. Plotting a path forward is certainly more complicated than before, but there’s much to make it worth doing. Reach out if I can help!