I think pets.com is probably the best analogy to what will happen with this first round of AI companies. In hindsight pets.com’s business model was fine and modern companies like chewy are doing the same thing successfully.
The problem was timing, internet adoption was low and most people didn’t understand how to use the Internet or trust it. Combine that with a flood of speculative dollars that mostly gets funneled into marketing with no adoption to justify it and the business falls apart.
I think we’ll see the same thing happen with some of these AI applications, the use case may be valid, but people, and the devs, won’t know how to use AI and the people won’t trust it so adoption will be low even with high marketing and the company will go bust. Then 10 years from now we’ll make fun of that AI party planning app that went under while we all plan our parties through some new AI app.
I think pets.com is probably the best analogy to what will happen with this first round of AI companies. In hindsight pets.com’s business model was fine and modern companies like chewy are doing the same thing successfully.
The problem was timing, internet adoption was low and most people didn’t understand how to use the Internet or trust it. Combine that with a flood of speculative dollars that mostly gets funneled into marketing with no adoption to justify it and the business falls apart.
I think we’ll see the same thing happen with some of these AI applications, the use case may be valid, but people, and the devs, won’t know how to use AI and the people won’t trust it so adoption will be low even with high marketing and the company will go bust. Then 10 years from now we’ll make fun of that AI party planning app that went under while we all plan our parties through some new AI app.