The Future with AI: Some Thoughts from A Practitioner

We are living in a very noisy world. There are so many things happening around us about AI. Almost every one is excited about AI. Almost every one in the community claims that they are doing AI or they are using AI to solve problems. Nevertheless, there is still only one OpenAI that could really bring AI to the production level. This means challenges and opportunities for us. Why? Because small and medium-sized companies do not have to scale to the level of OpenAI. We only need to scale to the level that is needed for small and medium-sized firms. This means that we could build a small team to solve a small and medium-sized problems with AI.

I will focus on opportunities in this post. Here is the outline of this post:

• The Current AI Tide
• Our Environment
• The Future of Digital Solutions
• The Right Mindset and the Right People

The Current AI Tide

I see people’s smile echoes with me when I quote the following sentence from Warren Buffett: “you only know who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” We all know people are building a bubble around AI. During this process, there will be a lot of people who are swimming naked. The question is: when will the tide go out? There are four kinds of groups that are swimming in the AI tide:

• The first movers and real AI practitioners like OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc.
• The followers who are trying to catch up with the first movers.
• The people who are talking about AI but not really doing AI.
• The people who think they are doing AI but they are not.

I think we should at least be in the second group. We should be the followers who are trying to catch up with the first movers. The worst case is the final one, who think they are doing AI but they are not.

Therefore, the key question is: how can we be the followers who are trying to catch up with the first movers? I think the answer is to make sure that we could at least replicate the products from the first movers and then add some values to the products in a small and medium-sized scale. It is all about imitation and implementation.

If you did some search on the LinkedIn, you will find so many firms who claim that they are provindg digital transformation services or data science solutions. Nevertheless, it is a big market with a lot of opportunities. We could still find our niche in the market and we need to survive and win in the market.

Figure 1. The Evolution of Industry from the Perspective of Competition.

Our Environment

Since we are in Europe (or we are not in the US), we have to face the following facts, which are summarized from the following graph.

Figure 2. The Market Value Distribution of IT firms Globally.

Figure 2 tells us that the market value of IT firms in the US or China is much higher than that in Europe. This means that we have to face the following facts:

• There is a lower chance for people in the Europe to be the first movers.
• There is a less number of talents who are doing AI in Europe.
• US and China have more know-how to build AI products than Europe.

Probably, that’s why we see many IT consulting firms in Europe. But I think the competitive advantage could be built up in the following ways:

• We could build a small team to solve a small and medium-sized problems with AI.
• We are not just providing IT consulting services. We are providing digital solutions and also delivering the solutions in code.
• we add AI to the digital solutions to make the solutions more intelligent.

The Future of Digital Solutions

The future of digital solutions could be summarized in the one sentence: AI is the new interaction technology. Please watch the following video to get a better understanding of the future of digital solutions.

In the nutshell, in the future, we will have three kinds of interaction technologies which could be equipped with conversational AI:

• Beside (like ChatGPT)
• Inside (like GitHub Copilot)
• Outside (like Microsoft Copilot)

For people who did not follow the latest development of AI, I would like to ask you to pay attention to the following two products: GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot. These two products are the future of digital solutions. We need to understand the full stack of these two products. The copilot stack is also known as the GPT-4 stack or LLM(Large Language Model) stack.

The following video from the CEO of Microsoft is a good introduction to the Microsoft Copilot Stack. Please watch it.

The Right Mindset and the Right People

I think the right mindset is to be the followers who are trying to catch up with the first movers. Basically, we need to learn from the best such as OpenAI and Google. At the same time, we need to have contacts with the people who are working in the first movers. We need to learn from them and we need to collaborate with them.