This reminds me of people saying that search engines were doomed as a business in the late 90's. They have no real moat. All you need is to gather all the text on the internet, make an index, and build it on well-known information retrieval algorithms. PageRank was even in a published paper.
Well, this was only mostly true. With search engines, there was a "winner-take-all" effect. Yes, many companies could build search engines, but Google was just a little bit better. Once one of the search engines is a little bit better, why would you use anything else?
Eventually, Google figured out how to create a real moat, by using click data to improve search result ranking. Even though Microsoft is willing to spend billions of dollars on Bing, they don't have access to Google's user data, and aren't quite able to match Google's search quality.
I believe that many AI startups will have a similar "data moat". If you are the first AI company to get a significant amount of users, you may be able to learn from their behavior to improve the product. If you can do this, you'll have an advantage that competitors won't be able to easily copy.
So just make something people want, gather data on what your users are doing, and use that data to make your product better. If you do that right, you'll keep growing, and you'll be able to describe this simple strategy as a "proprietary data advantage" to give your slides more buzzwords if you need them.
Well, this was only mostly true. With search engines, there was a "winner-take-all" effect. Yes, many companies could build search engines, but Google was just a little bit better. Once one of the search engines is a little bit better, why would you use anything else?
Eventually, Google figured out how to create a real moat, by using click data to improve search result ranking. Even though Microsoft is willing to spend billions of dollars on Bing, they don't have access to Google's user data, and aren't quite able to match Google's search quality.
I believe that many AI startups will have a similar "data moat". If you are the first AI company to get a significant amount of users, you may be able to learn from their behavior to improve the product. If you can do this, you'll have an advantage that competitors won't be able to easily copy.
So just make something people want, gather data on what your users are doing, and use that data to make your product better. If you do that right, you'll keep growing, and you'll be able to describe this simple strategy as a "proprietary data advantage" to give your slides more buzzwords if you need them.