The importance of in-app AI
Where will AI-native companies take down incumbents?
I recently published a post where I used the OpenAI API to map the “Brooklyn” of cities around the world. I used AI to actually tell me the neighborhood that was the brooklyn of each city (for example, The Marais in Paris), and to give me the coordinates of those cities so that I could plot them in Tableau.
The most annoying part of the process was porting the data into Tableau to plot it. It would have been a lot simpler if Tableau had AI capabilities that I could have used to query for the neighborhoods and get the coordinates.
My question is, to what extent will:
Incumbent products like Tableau integrate AI quickly enough to defend their market share
New AI-native companies emerge that integrate AI from the beginning (Equals is an example that comes to mind) and steal market share quickly from incumbents
ChatGPT render lots of individual applications unnecessary because you can just do the things you need to do within that application — for example, you can do a lot of data analysis within ChatGPT now which removes the need for a separate BI app
To me, it actually seems like AI is fast enough to integrate that incumbents will be able to use it to defend market share in a lot of cases. Microsoft and Google products certainly seem to have a big advantage in this since they are so heavily invested in AI already. But I will be curious to see where a product like Salesforce-owned Tableau ends up in 3 years.