How Soon Could Huge New Generative AI Industries Emerge?

How soon will generative artificial intelligence produce some obvious huge new behaviors, firms, apps, use cases, business models and industries, as happened with the internet?

Consumer products generally reach an adoption inflection point at about 10-percent consumer adoption. So if consumer AI use cases follow precedent, mass market success will happen when any single use case or app hits about 10-percent usage. 

Generative AI usage likely will reach 10 percent in 2024 in many markets, suggesting a rapid uptake period will commence. 

But use of generative AI, quite often as a feature of an existing experience, is a possibly-different matter from creation of wholly-new use cases, value propositions and industries, as happened with the growth of internet use. 

And it will still take some time for such new use cases, apps, value propositions and industries to emerge. 

Some leading internet apps--including Google search; Facebook social media; Amazon e-commerce and Google Maps for navigation--took between three and eight years to reach 10-percent usage levels. 

Keep in mind those innovations represented new behaviors, value and business models for new firms in new industries, as opposed to use of the internet by legacy firms and processes. 

It took longer--almost twice as long--for each of these apps to reach adoption by half of people. The point is that even if generative artificial intelligence is highly successful at creating new behaviors, use cases, apps and firms, it will take up to a decade and a half for that success to be quite obvious, as defined by usage. And it probably goes without saying that this is true only for the most-popular, most commercially-successful new use cases, apps and firms. Most implementations will prove to be insignificant or actually fail to achieve success.

So it might be rational and realistic to assume huge new industries will emerge only after some time. Even if GenAI propagates faster than did the leading new search, social media and e-commerce apps did in the earlier internet era. 

And it is always possible that development times wind up being slower or equal to that of the new internet use cases (search, social media and e-commerce). 

In other words, any huge new AI-based behaviors, apps, use cases and business models and industry categories might still take some years to emerge clearly. Right now, most AI use cases are as enhancements to existing products and services.

That’s useful and helpful, but probably not disruptive. And with AI, we really will be looking for huge disruptive impact, as is the case for other general-purpose technologies.