Enterprise AI is Moving Fast, and Other Takeaways From a Week With Amazon

It’s the two year anniversary of ChatGPT and, to ring it in, I found myself wandering through an enterprise software conference.

With a red AWS re:Invent lanyard around my neck last week, I moved past logos from companies like Deloitte, MongoDB, and PwC, and wondered how a technology that once seemed poised to change the way we all interact with computers became the latest B2B software craze.

Outside of ChatGPT, consumer adoption of generative AI has been slow, but B2B firms have been pushing the tech to its limit. They are building agents, using AI to summarize massive amounts of documents, and fixing broken processes with models that make meaning from the madness.

Perhaps like the Blackberry, a business technology that demonstrated the power of the smartphone before the iPhone, enterprise AI will preview GenAI’s broader potential. So to learn where things are headed, I spent three packed days with the early adopters. Here’s what stood out:

Generative AI Will Be an Enterprise Thing for a While

Businesses have problems that people don’t. Most are trying to be hiveminds that centralize knowledge and act as a single organism. But so much business knowledge is contained within different systems, or kept by different people, or so voluminous that no human can efficiently consume it. So now, they’re embracing generative AI as a tool to ingest this knowledge, analyze it, and spit out the useful bits. The technology is well suited for their specific problem, and they’re investing heavily.

Matt Wood, an ex-Amazon executive who’s now the Commercial Technology and Innovation Officer at PwC, told me he believes that spending on generative AI today is split almost evenly between bots like ChatGPT and API access used to build enterprise tools. But “there’s much larger growth in the API usage” he said, speaking of the activity at PwC.

Enterprises’ embrace of generative AI should help fund the technology as consumer use cases get worked out. And because regular people don’t have a similar glaring problem that generative AI can solve, the ‘AI phone’ and other consumer AI services aren’t likely to arrive imminently.

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