This is the age of AI and many startups are emerging. Over the last few weeks, I have been looking at ways how innovative AI companies are launching. From America to China, here are the main three paths:
Partner with a company with a large user base. OpenAI’s ChatGPT partnered with Microsoft which has millions of users. Microsoft is providing the feedstuff (yes, the data) to advance ChatGPT at scale.
Spend a huge amount of money via promos and advertisements to get data which will improve your AI models as quickly as possible. This is the Temu path; Temu uses AI to power shopping in its ecosystem. It spent $5 million for a 30-second advert during America’s Superbowl game, the largest yearly sports event in the nation. Without the data, the mission will be limited. Sure, many will launch but without the data, scaling may be challenging.
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Bake AI into existing in-house data. If you are lucky, and you have the data as Google does, you can launch your Bard equivalent once your code is ready. So, Google was able to launch. The same has happened in Baidu and Alibaba as those firms also have tons of data.
The successful AI companies are going to be those with access to data. This is typical because in the internet age, influencing and controlling demand offers more strategic positioning than influencing supply. Supply is the algorithm/model but without data, it offers limited value. If you are out there in Africa, planning to launch an AI business, you must have a clear view where the data will come. Yes, this goes beyond mathematics and coding!
If you plan to run an internet business, think about how you can control demand. You have already lost the power and capacity to control supply. Yes, anyone can use a credit card, irrespective of geography to buy anything online. The quantity you bring will not have material impact in the total pool in the market.
Nonetheless, you still need to find ways to create a separation. That could be by creating perception demand or simply by building massive data ecosystems which will give you access to be the digital kingmaker in a specialized sector since the ICT utilities like Google and Facebook, as I noted in a recent Harvard Business Review piece, have control of the broad internet.
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It also means that displacement is not happening anytime soon at scale in Africa, since there’s no data to bake and hype things. We are good like that. If others lose their way, they can come to Africa for course correction…