Some random thoughts around this:
Background: Many years ago I did strategic planning for Toyota South Africa. One of the things about ‘forecasting” that I learned during that time was: “Futurists always overestimate the amount of societal change, while underestimating the amount of technological change that will take place”.
All progress is non-linear, and hopefully it is exponential with a exponent larger than one. AI is progressing with a very large exponent. And the faster it grows, the more people it leaves behind. Working to include as many people as possible is going to be a very necessary endeavour - and one that I think quite a few makers in the Coda space is working very hard to achieve.
But as with all of major changes, it will have to move beyond being a fad, and into something that is really useful. And the scope of AI influence is vast, and it will continue at an uneven pace. In this forum we are debating the Superhuman/ Grammarly/ Coda environment. Elsewhere different activities are taking place.
One example that I am very familiar with: My son studied undergraduate biology and Data Science master at Kennesaw University. As part of that study, he and his team trained an AI to recognise the very dangerous, and very difficult to identify Candida Auris fungus. All you need to use this, is a lab level microscope with a camera, and an email to be able to send the image to the AI. The cost to identify the fungus was a very small fraction of traditional methods, and simultaneously a small fraction of the time. One of the professors was dismissive because it did not require expensive technology…. The results languished for six months while my son was trying to get Kennesaw management to progress funding - both to roll out the C. Auris identifier, as well as to train the AI to recognise more cell types. (They had six at the end, including a control cell.) He is now a full stack developer at a bullion trading company in Denver, lost to medicine, and the research is sitting somewhere, gathering dust.
At my current workplace, I have developed some (I think) really good and productive Coda tools. But the interface is not Excel, is not Word, and people just are not interested. Yes, it is not a company heavily into tech, and maybe my communication skills are not what it could be. But if I cannot move them the small step into Coda docs, how am I going to move them into “agentic AI”? Unless it gets done in a way that they do not even notice it. And I think that that is what is going to happen over the next 10 years and following - AI will become invisible in daily knowledge work. And then it will take off.
Other data points - Excel is most famous for being “the accountant’s tool”, but that did not stop it from being used for statistical analysis, engineering, and plain old lists. IBM’s PC got the Personal Computer accepted in businesses all around the world, except in IBM. For too long IBM let the PC Division be an also ran in the company, and they subsequently lost the leadership in PC’s, but also all computer hardware.
Earlier you mentioned that 80% of Spreadsheet relevant to major business decision have major errors in them - can you imagine the havoc that uncontrolled/ unsupervised AI could cause? We have already seen high profile examples in some court cases, and in American Government healthcare reporting.
How do I bring the weave together?
@Shishir ‘s challenge, over and above the technology, is to manage the Venn diagram you mention. As the integrated solution is being developed and rolled out, it will be important to not ignore the Grammarly, Coda and Superhuman populations that have made the individual products successful. Don’t let the technological progress run away from the customer. Don’t do the opposite of IBM, and focus so much on the new stuff that your existing revenue streams shrivel up.
Do take advantage of your existing enthusiastic Coda community, and address the various pain points that have been raised. And the same for Grammarly and Superhuman. Find and promote the people that identify the C Auris fungus, make room for their contributions to expand the Venn diagram center. And my hobby horse - do also pay attention to the soft issues - do well managed product launches that do not alienate large portions of your existing user base.
In the 80’s strategist Michael Porter divided the business world into high quality, low volume, high margin businesses on the one hand, and low quality, low margin, high volume business on the other hand. In the 21st century successful business string together many core competencies. In this case, it has to be AND Coda AND Grammarly AND Superhuman AND Superhuman Go AND large data bases AND retaining the no-code citizen developer ethos.
But, it’s just a ramble
Rambling Pete