The rise of the AI solopreneur
Companies canceling ChatGPT subscriptions
Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt on the AI bubble
Are Hidden Gaps in Your Pipeline Costing You Deals? Every Missed Lead is Money Left on the Table.
Teams don’t lose deals because of weak demand, but because they don’t follow up enough.
That’s where a Wing Assistant changes the math. Clients see more closed deals every month without paying $8K+ for a full-time closer.
How?
1. Instant replies via DMs & emails
2. Leads chased within 24-48h before they cool off
3. Every CRM update logged
Result: No missed messages. More revenue this quarter.
***
The rise of the AI solopreneur
The technology is allowing entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses on their own. Sarah Gwilliam is neither a software engineer nor—by her own admission—someone who “speaks AI”. But after her father died recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative artificial-intelligence startup that would help others like her handle their grief and sort out their late loved ones’ affairs. Call it wedding planning for funerals.
Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an established business. But apart from herself, almost no human being is helping her build it. She has joined an AI-powered incubator, called Audos, which decided that her idea was promising. Its bots helped to set her up online and on Instagram. If her idea works out, the incubator will not only provide capital; its AI agents will support Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales, marketing and back-office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not need staff. In effect, AI helped her co-found the company. “I can’t tell you how empowering it was,” she says.
As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already coined a neologism that describes single founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are “solopreneurs”. In tech circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the first single-person unicorn—an unlisted firm worth more than $1bn. Some hope that generative AI will make starting a business so cheap and hassle-free that anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur much as anyone can become a YouTuber—a breath of fresh air in America’s concentrated business landscape. Whether people like Ms Gwilliam will be able to escape the suffocating grip of the tech giants, however, is another matter.
Henrik Werdelin, who co-founded Audos, describes AI as the next wave in that “democratisation”. “You don’t need to code, you don’t need to be able to use Photoshop, because you can get AI to help with that.” This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of startups built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology but who have identified real problems to solve.
Another possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller companies’ best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine. What she calls “first-mover disadvantage” could be “a bummer”, but it could also validate her idea. “Maybe they’ll come to me and say, ‘We want Solace.’ And then I’ll be, like, ‘Great, sold!’” Just like a typical entrepreneur, then….
***
Some companies are canceling ChatGPT subscriptions
Companies that buy artificial intelligence chatbots for their workers have many options, and some of them have started looking for the cheapest option. That could explain new data from payments startup Ramp, showing a slight dip in the percentage of Ramp customers that spent money on AI products like ChatGPT between May and June, to 42% from 42.5%.Ramp’s more than 30,000 corporate card customers collectively spend billions of dollars annually on AI, and the share of companies spending on the tools has been steadily increasing since the start of 2023 before falling slightly for the first time in June, according to Ramp economist Ara Kharazian.
He said more companies have been canceling corporate chatbot subscriptions such as ChatGPT, though other forms of AI spending, such as paying for models through application programming interfaces, have continued to climb. Despite the chatbot cancellations, corporate spending on AI has been rising steadily overall, Kharazian said. That trend is reflected in the growing sales at firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are on track to exceed revenue goals that sounded crazy not too long ago.
Still, the data suggests some AI customers may be gravitating toward free options. For instance, earlier this year Google started including its Gemini chatbot in its Workspace productivity apps for companies by default while slightly raising the base subscription price for its bundle. Microsoft similarly makes some of its Copilot chatbot features free to business users (although it still charges an additional $30 per month for businesses who want the version of Copilot that integrates with its Office 365 software).
Those options could incentivize businesses to cancel their paid subscriptions to competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Both of those companies also offer free versions of their chatbots for individual subscribers, and companies could tell workers to use those instead. “This is a very competitive landscape, an increasing number of tools are being offered for free, especially chat services and especially to business users,” Kharazian said....
***
AI’s double bubble trouble
Analysts at the IMF, the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citi are all warning that valuations are surging to levels not seen since the dotcom crash 25 years ago. The implicit message is that AI is overhyped.The reaction of bullish west coast tech bros has been to shrug and carry on investing, drawing a distinction between a “good” industrial investment bubble and a “bad” speculative financial bubble. But the strong likelihood is that we are experiencing both. One of the most articulate advocates of the good bubble theory is Google’s former boss Eric Schmidt. “Bubbles are great. May the bubbles continue,” he told me at the Sifted summit last week. Their historical function has been to redirect masses of capital into frontier technology and infrastructure, which is good for the world. But the latest technological transformation comes with a novel twist: AI will one day far exceed the cognitive capabilities of humans. “I think it’s underhyped, not overhyped. And I look forward to being proven correct in five or ten years.”
For sure, some companies over-invest in infrastructure in bubbly times and go bust, as was the case with Global Crossing, which built out internet infrastructure in the 1990s. There are also questions about whether the AI investment boom will leave behind the computational infrastructure of the 21st century in the same way that previous investment booms bequeathed railway tracks, power grids and Internet fiberoptic networks. As the tech analysts Azeem Azhar and Nathan Warren noted in a recent essay, about one-third of AI-related capital expenditure is being sunk into shortlived assets, such as Nvidia’s graphics processing units. But GPUs age in dog years, as the authors put it, with a useful life for frontier applications of about three years. That implies that AI companies’ investments must generate a return within a few years, rather than generations.
When asked this week whether we were in an AI bubble, the scientist and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram said: “The answer is obviously yes.” And what did he make of all the talk about AGI? “It’s a meaningless thing,” he said, during an onstage interview at the London Institute for Mathematical Studies. Naming a technology after an ambition rather than a reality struck another participant as odd, rather like describing economics as universal prosperity.
There seems little doubt that AI is opening up all kinds of scientific and economic possibilities that are as yet impossible to predict, model or value. Wolfram argued that AI could transform scientific discovery given the extra computing power that could be thrown at so many problems. As it is, humans rely on 100bn neurons to understand the universe. What becomes possible with the 100tn neurons that AI could in effect give us? The scientist said he had been living the “AI dream” for 40 years. Now, it seems, it is finally being realized. The question is: at what price?....
Enjoy, SBalley Team!