18 Months
No, not the time it takes to gestate two little ones (minus twins of course.) This is the amount of time the industry has before today’s user interface is by and large rendered obsolete.
It could be within a year because the rate of change coming from GenAI and its impact on user expectations is happening at lightning speed. It’ll make the browser, advent of the internet, and search feel like child’s play.
Some of us were around through these technical waves and we’ve been tracking them forever. In our 31 years at Outsell we have seen it all. Tech cycle after tech cycle, each one speeds things up; this one is happening at humdinger speed. Perplexity and ChatGPT, already trained users to expect answers. And when Google came flying out of the barn door it wasn’t long after when users in the enterprise expected Google-like experiences in their enterprise information offerings. Forget Boolean.
That set the tone for what good looked like and users demanded that high bar. Speaking with a leader this past week, he shared an exchange with his team saying they have 3 years before their interface needs to change. My challenge back was 18 months max and maybe even a year. Urgency will matter especially if market share leaders are to hold their lead. Answers are already the metaphor du jour. Deliver them or bust.
Another thing that happens with big tech is they have an insatiable appetite for big broad horizontal solutions and blind spots around vertical ones.
And just like search, mobile, and social bore their way into every-day life, so too with AI until it disappears into the background and operates just about everything; and then vertical solutions emerge; remember vertical search? We saw the beginnings of horizontal to vertical just this week with Grammarly. In an exchange with my colleague David Worlock:
…” My take on this is that generalised AI writing tools are available very widely in most generative AI environments. The games that Grammarly are playing is making a professional writing environment for people for whom writing is the bulk of their workload — our analysts for example. I imagine that other skill sets will attract other specialist platforms — numeracy for people in accounts who are not accountants, et cetera et cetera. … we will also have vertical market specialist applications…”
It’s already starting… Horizontal giving way to vertical.