Campus Technology Insider Podcast January 2024
Howard Holton 34:44
Yeah, I would say, start with, did they ever ask if they should, rather than just if they could? Like right now, VCs will hand you, like they just back up a truck and load money if you say "I've got a new generative AI" insert adjective noun adjective noun, right? And so you've got a ton of companies that they had a product, they weren't really getting much funding, and they tacked on generative AI so they could go through another round of funding. Right? So, so it kind of goes back to what I said at the beginning, where what I found out with AI was the trick's not in the data. Data is a massive requirement. The trick's not in, does it get an insight. The trick is actually in the question. And so when you're looking at these things and they go, "We have generative AI built in," cool, why? Right? What do you think a better understanding of the English language is going to solve that you couldn't solve otherwise? And oftentimes, what they'll do is a little bit of song and dance, they'll throw some marketecture up on a slide, and they'll try to baffle you with buzzwords. Just walk out of the room. Right? They don't know either. They're, they're really, they've just captured some VC funding, right? But then you're gonna have companies that go, "Well, what we found was in cybersecurity, everyone bubbles up alerts, it's hard to tell the noise. And we said, hey, this is a 99% flaw, it's related to CVE-9703-23, and that didn't mean anything. And so what we did instead was we changed it so that you get a generative AI output that's much easier for teams to read and understand exactly where they need to target." Oh, that seems like a good use of it. Or, "We have a, we're a low-code platform. And there's a learning curve to a low-code platform. And so what we did was we fed generative AI our documentation, and allow you to ask how to do things. And then what we found was, we could actually turn that around and turn your prompt and the response into code samples, and then automatically integrate the code samples." Oh, that seems like actually a good use. You kind of thought about, where are the challenges your users have? How do we address those challenges so that they can get to what they should be buying the platform for in the first place? Those are reasonable uses. Also, keep in mind we're at the absolute bare-bottom infancy of how we're going to see this technology used in the future. Just AI as a whole, generative AI, has opened the door for conversations that people were closed to before. Just by the fact that we are now interacting with AI in a massive scale for the first time, has opened the door for kind of a reinvigoration of the meta topic that is AI, right? And we're really at the infancy. So we're really going to see some strong movement, both directions, to marketecture, as well as to really good use cases that it's again, it's kind of beyond the horizon of what we can see today.
David Weil 37:47
Really, I agree with everything that's been said. Just want to add two things: one, that we are at just the beginning, which also means be careful where you place your bets. There's a lot of companies that want our money. And that goes to my second point: The costs for this thing are all over the map. We're seeing examples where some companies are jacking up prices 10, 20, 40, 50, 100%, based upon the fact that well, we now have generative AI or we have this capability. This is a gold rush. And we don't know the market has not settled at all in terms of what the true value and cost is going to be for these. Proceed with caution. It doesn't mean don't proceed, but I would be cautious about long-term investment.
Howard Holton 38:34
I was gonna say, short-term contracts are your friend right now. Right? Short-term investments, it's going to cost you more in the short term, but in the long term, it gives you the ability to pivot to something that's a little smarter. Additionally, ChatGPT just changed their pricing, and it's effectively a 2.3x blended reduction in cost. The vendors that had integrated ChatGPT have not, I mean, it's one day old, we're not going to, they're not going to correct that cost, not for quite a while. Right? Short-term gives you the ability to take advantage of the change in economics, long-term does not. You tie into a contract, you're in the contract. Right? So give yourself the out, give yourself the flexibility. We're going to see a lot of disruption, we're going to see a lot of change. If you can look at shorter than 12 months, adoption cycles are hard and everything, maybe think about month to month, maybe think about quarter, quarter to quarter, right? Make them work for it.
Rhea Kelly 39:30
Thank you for joining us. I'm Rhea Kelly, and this was the Campus Technology Insider podcast. You can find us on the major podcast platforms or visit us online at campustechnology.com/podcast. Let us know what you think of this episode and what you'd like to hear in the future. Until next time.