90% of startups have plans or have released an AI feature, 54% of those features will launch in 2023, but only 30% of companies are hiring new people to do it, according to ProductBoard’s survey.
These figures highlight three points:
- AI has become an essential product component for most software companies.
- Startups have aggressively prioritized these features on their roadmaps with 54% launching a feature this year.
- AI deployment is sufficiently straightforward that a majority of teams won’t hire new experts to build them & will staff 1-2 people to launch them.
The last one is the most striking.
Training, deploying, & optimizing machine learning models has historically required teams of dedicated researchers, production engineers, data collection & labeling teams. Even fully staffed, teams required years to develop models with reasonably accurate performance. Today, it’s a matter of days or weeks.
Newer LLMs (large-language models) simplify AI-feature development in the same way Twilio empowered developers to send an SMS with five-lines of code, abstracting the complexities of carrier-integration. Stripe did the same, simplifying credit card payments.
Building a chatbot for some collection of customer support articles or blog posts is straightforward :
- Gather your documents
- Save them in a vector database
- Upload the vector database
- Start chatting away by hitting the API
The time to utility is measured in minutes.
Every company will be an AI company, because the technology is simple-enough to deploy & powerful-enough to work sufficiently well out-of-the-box that most companies can get started today.
