Attended an amazing South Park Commons Summer Demo Faire yesterday!
Reporting back a few thoughts running through my head in real-time:
1. Essentially, the capabilities & design of every core SaaS use case are being reimagined by AI founders as we speak. In a future steady state, I see many of them living inside larger product suites as “features”, either via the incumbent fast-following and shipping them, or via small acquisitions/acqui-hires.
2. Consumer AI products remind me a lot of the 1st gen iPhone apps. Founders (developers) rapidly shipping entertaining, almost “toy-like” use cases. Like in mobile, will something massive eventually come out of these? So hard to tell…
3. An underlying capability of AI that a majority of products seem to be leveraging is “contextual artifact creation”. Eg. creating videos & decks in real time, replacing specific elements instantly in pre-existing media etc.
4. While the underlying “intelligence” capabilities of the products seem to be next-level, the UI/ UX as of now seems quite incremental relative to the mobile/cloud era. Lots more discovery & risk-taking needs to happen here.
5. Across enterprise & consumer/prosumer, it’s clear that these products can only manifest their power when they have access to extremely differentiated & diverse sources of data. In some contexts, it was unclear how a startup would get access to many such datasets in a fresh & relevant manner.
6. In legacy industries like govt/ public sector, AI-native products, even with game-changing capabilities, will still need to deal with age-old GTM challenges (long sales cycle, who will buy, what are the incentives for users to adopt etc).
7. Finally, it’s still pretty effin’ hard to pull off a glitch-free, low-latency AI demo.
Congrats to all the presenting SPC founders. Can’t wait for how these products shape up going forward!
