“Not another chat bot”

In 2023 the denouncing catch-cry from great the unwashed about faux innovation was all about the “GPT Wrapper”. Those experimenting with how this new technology works (or doesn’t work) and building little MVP’s to test new ideas, were told they hadn’t accomplished anything. There was no business there (even if they were making money). With later iterations of core models, in some cases, that turned out to be true. You now dont need a seperate tool to talk to your PDF or create a new image for a post. The LLM’s themselves have built those in as their own features, no doubt having looked on as what was popular in the wild.

In 2024 we’ve moved into the “Not another chat bot” phase. The thing is, nearly everyone I speak to is now moving from the “what should I do” or phase of their AI journey into the “how should I do it”. As I foreshadowed in last week’s newsletter, this is why we are now working on building out a marketplace to help people in travel looking for the right ai powered tools they need to get into the ‘doing’ side of things. And guess what nearly everyone wants to start with…….

Yep…. A chat bot. Some want it internal for their sales teams to get answers quicker, others want it customer facing to take pressure off sales and customer service teams. Post pandemic, nearly everyone is doing more with fewer and they need help.

Some are going for industry specific vendors like those that were showcased in the recent Arival report I co-authored with Christian Watts (you need to be a paid member to read the case studies, I’m afraid). Others are using Zendesk or new kid on the chat block Watermelon 🍉. Others still are waiting (or hoping) their already expensive CRM provider will fix it for them or getting in a technical consultant to help build one bespoke. But almost no-one with a business I speak to on my multiple calls per day is not thinking about not having this solution.

And this got me thinking about the LLM’s and what they need to do to differentiate from one another. What they need more than anything else is unique data sets. They all have equal access to the published internet. Google has tied up Reddit data. Grok has X. But what about all the information that isn’t published? All the stuff hidden away in folders on servers and in documents?

What if one of the LLM makers decided their next feature was to help any business create and deploy a chat bot for a nominal fee (eg ChatGPT pro is $20 a month whereas other versions above run in the hundreds of dollars a month) in return for being able to train on the data inside? And as an extra benefit, if what the LLM learned in its training was that your data was the best answer to a specific natural language query, they’d include a link back to you?

Is that deal you’d take? Or is what is not published online your core IP which is why it is locked away and can never be let loose, even if it solves massive pain in your business for peanuts?