No one doubts AI can be a great help to businesses. However, is it any good as a business?
None of the companies that develop AI models — including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — can say when they might even break even on their huge investments in it.
As Christopher Mims pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia calculated that in 2023 the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI while only bringing in $3 billion in revenue. As of last October OpenAI was spending $700,000 each day to run ChatGPT. Charging enough to pay for that would deter anyone from using it. So far OpenAI has investors lining up to give it money, but at some point, they may want to see at least a path to profitability.
To quote the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
One of the problems for all these companies is there is no clear differentiator between their products. All general-purpose AIs train on much the same data and deliver essentially the same results. As Mims wrote: “All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up.”
The result is AI commodification and barring a technological breakthrough that’s unlikely to change.
Here are this week’s AI-powered martech releases, enhancements and upgrades.
- Salesforce Tableau’s Tableau Pulse leverages Tableau AI to make data more accessible to all users regardless of their experience with data visualization. An insights platform runs atop the data, surfacing insights (based on defined metrics and KPIs) in natural language using genAI.
- Wix.com’s AI-powered mobile app builder. Through a conversational AI chat experience, Wix Users describe the intent of the app via chat and the builder creates a professional, unique and customizable application. It can be customized via the Mobile App Editor to make additional changes such as sections, widgets, designs, themes, and more.
- Lightricks’ LTX Studio AI video production tool has new project creation capabilities. Users can start projects in two ways: Script to Video converts a script or creative brief into a detailed visual storyboard; and Blank Canvas lets you start with a blank storyboard and generate an entire story, frame by frame. Also, Style Reference lets users upload any visual asset to apply that style to the project.
- Bluehost’s AI Website Creator lets WordPress users create a personalized and unique website with relevant content, images and pages in minutes.
- Vidmob and Realeyes partnered to Realeyes attention metrics to Vidmob’s creative data platform. It can now score attention performance for every ad from any ad account linked to Vidmob. Also, Vidmob’s creative analytics provides AI-generated recommendations on how to improve ads.
- Bridgeline Digital’s HawkSearch Smart Responses feature engages users with interactive conversational dialogue based on search queries. It prompts follow-up questions and suggestions, imitating a personalized online sales assistant.
- Sprout Social’s Generate by AI Assist writes accurate alt-text for images, and Analyze by AI Assist finds performance and conversation trends. The social media management platform can also classify and prioritize inbound messages and craft suggested responses.
- AudiencePoint added several features to its email campaign platform. These include anomaly detection, send time optimization, content personalization, and identifying high-value customer segments and those at risk of being lost.
- Keen Decision Systems added an AI model overlay to analyze media plans and provide a high-level analysis specific to that dataset. It also provides recommendations for spending and channel allocation over time, and suggests changes in a marketing mix model based on whether a marketer wants to optimize spend or maximize profit, or if there are changes in the marketing environment, such as seasonal factors or inflation.
- Banzai International’s Reach AI-powered phone agent can scale up phone campaigns to reach thousands of targeted B2B or B2C contacts with consistent conversations
- FullThrottle Technologies’ Audience Planner simplifies creating and implementing targeted advertising audiences. Users type business goals into the platform and it generates a draft audience plan based on the content of the prompt.
About the author
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
