Who Wants to Play AI Leapfrog? 🐸

CHART OF THE WEEK

AI Leapfrogging: How AI Will Transform “Lagging” Industries

Technological leapfrogging occurs when an industry or market (usually an outmoded industry or emerging market) skips a step along the technology transformation chain.

Many African countries went straight from cash to mobile payments. Americans were still carrying credit cards (and forgetting them at bars) while Africans had already moved onto a fast, borderless payments infrastructure.

Leapfrogging isn’t common across the history of technology, but when it happens, it’s seismic. And the conditions for AI to leapfrog traditional SaaS are arising in many “lagging” industries right now.

Packaged correctly, Generative AI might spell the end of complex onboarding processes (who will miss those?) and unintuitive workflows that have kept switching costs high.

It sweetens the value prop immensely. And creates a tipping point by both reducing the burden of a shift to digitization, and enhancing the value of that change 100x.

But according to NfX, these leapfrogging opportunities don’t last long. We saw it with the emergence of mobile, and with digital payments. Within three to five years, the major players had already executed the jump.

Right now, the AI leapfrogging window is wide open.

GENERATIVE AI

Build Different with Gen AI

New AI solutions are emerging at an unprecedented pace. So what sets one apart from the rest?

Speed.

Speed is the difference between a bike and a rocket.

It's the difference between capitalizing on what NfX calls the “AI Leapfrog” and failing to transform. It's the key to unlocking the potential of your data.

Last Thursday, we introduced A.Team's Generative AI Practice at our Generative AI Salon, attended by over 400 of the world’s top AI builders.

Based on our experience building generative AI technology for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, we designed our offering to help organizations integrate AI, unlocking new levels of efficiency and personalization, anticipating customer needs, and delivering hyper-personalized AI solutions at scale.

A.Team can connect your company work with AI experts to identify opportunities and then assemble a nimble team to build a high-impact prototype within 5 weeks. Start Building.

GENERATIVE AI

How Startups Can Leverage AI Without Getting Caught in the Hype Cycle

When considering how to incorporate these technologies into your startup, you may feel naturally overwhelmed and confused.

Beyond the flashy demo you just saw, what is the impact on your deployment costs? What should your latency requirements be and can they be met by this solution? What about data privacy or legal risks? There's a lot to consider, and it's normal to get caught in analysis paralysis.

You need a plan.

Here are the five steps to kick you into action:

1. Don't delay

Not necessarily because you want to be faster than your competitors, but because there is a lot to figure out in this new and fast changing landscape. You need to think hard about how to achieve product-market fit in this new reality.

2. Make it about your problem

Make sure you're solving a real problem, not just adding AI at all costs. After all, AI is just a tool, a truly powerful one for sure, but not an end in itself when it comes to use cases. It's easy to fall prey to FOMO and jump into wild adoption without a clear vision.

3. Start the easy way

There's no need to complicate your life with deployment options, complex inference costs considerations, and latency requirements, when you are still uncertain about how well this new wave of AI solutions will perform on your problem, with your data. Get started with fully managed cloud services served via APIs.

4. Optimize aggressively

Flex your engineering muscle and dive deep into model selection and deployment. There are a ton of opportunities for switching to open source models, which are generally less capable than the flagship models from the big players such as OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, but that offer unparalleled control. Through careful engineering and model steering, you can achieve a competitive advantage.

5. Don't commit long-term

Avoid long-term commitment to any vendor contract or even a particular model. The field is changing way too fast and you want to maximize for flexibility

With the right approach, AI can be a powerful tool, but it requires diligence and flexibility to utilize without being overwhelmed or left behind. Read the full article.

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Apply for Endless Frontier Labs’ 2023-2024 Startup Mentorship Program to reach your Series A and beyond. EFL is equity free and fee free.

Our graduates in Digital Tech, Life Science and Deep Tech have raised more than $1.7B in funding. Join EFL at an upcoming info session.

Email Beth Xie, Associate Director at EFL, with any questions.  

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