Wednesday, December 11, 2024

AI Agents Might be Key to Creating Whole New Industries

Think about the content creation chores you find most tedious and then imagine those tasks fulfilled by an artificial intelligence agent, such as Google is prepping with the release of Gemini 2.0.

For me, creating presentations has always been an unpleasant chore. So I’d welcome an agent that create such slide shows automatically, without me having to create outlines, create designs, find graphics and orchestrate all that. It’s coming.

If AI emerges as a “general-purpose technology,” the capabilities are likely to dwarf anything we can presently conceive of. That has tended to be the case with all prior GPTs as well, including:

• Spoken language
• Mastery of fire
• The wheel
• Writing
• The printing press
• The steam engine
• Electricity
• The railroad
• The automobile
• The telephone
• The computer
* The internet

“Imagine a world in which you just write a SQL statement that goes to act on a PDF and produces a bunch of structured information out on the other side,” says Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy.

Still, it is worth noting that we are likely unable to envision many ways AI, as a GPT, could create new possibilities. Most often, we can conceive of how AI can automate and therefore improve the utility of any number of processes.

What generally seems to escape us are the new things we never imagined before. Sure, most of us can imagine an artificial intelligence agent that takes care of other consumer chores as well. The agent might find products and negotiate prices on behalf of a consumer user; find vacation destinations and creates your plans.

Also conceivable are AI-enhanced methods for managing home heating, cooling or lights, health monitoring that additionally schedules appointments when needed.

But those are examples of things we can imagine. The big breakthroughs tend to be things we have not encountered before, and mostly cannot imagine. Search and social media are examples. Ride-hailing likewise is something most of us would not have predicted.

Agent functions seem to be the sorts of experiences that could fuel entirely-new ways of doing things, and hence create possible new firms and industries.

Business uses are likewise areas where our own imaginations don’t help much. Sure, we can see how AI can further automate what we already do, improving:

• Real-time customer service
• Inventory management
• Marketing campaign management and content generation
• Vehicle fleet performance monitoring and maintenance scheduling
• Automated task delegation and workflow management
• Fraud detection
• Quality control in manufacturing processes
• Predictive maintenance for equipment and machinery
• Automated customer sentiment analysis

But that is largely predictable.

What always is difficult are envisioning entirely-new value propositions and the impact on existing ways of doing things. That, in turn, means the possibility of disruption of firm and industry market positions, unit economics, competitive dynamics, and business strategies.

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