The Future Of AI Is Creative: How It Will Empower The Next Set Of Entrepreneurs
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues its march toward becoming the backbone of digital transformation, it’s creating a new class of entrepreneurs. This new class is being empowered by the ability to use AI to generate ideas for and launch new businesses, and it’s quickly changing the landscape of business innovation. According to a new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), AI is unleashing a new wave of entrepreneurs who are using it to generate new business ideas, create and launch new products and services, and build new businesses.
So, I didn’t write the above paragraph—the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) model did. The AI so advanced that it even cited a credible source to support its argument. If you’re surprised, you shouldn’t be. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a tremendous upswing in a set of technologies called “creative AI.” These technologies, such as GPT-3, have transformed our understanding of how machines can be used to create.
The most popular of these, GPT-3, essentially allows you to generate paragraphs out of a single line of text. DALL-E and Stable Diffusionallow you to create images out of text.
Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of startups using these technologies to provide consumer services for founders and companies. A recent survey found that, when asked what technologies they plan to have in place by the end of 2022, 43% of technical leaders cited NLP. Sixty percent of tech leaders said their budgets for AI language technologies increased by at least 10% in 2020.
For entrepreneurs, this is a game changer. An early-stage founder needs to be able to code, sell and market at the same time. Startup founders often report a lack of specific knowledge and team expertise as significant hurdles in building successful companies.Personally, I can attest to this. As a founder trying to bootstrap, I spent countless hours learning how to run campaigns, from creating compelling marketing copy to creating funny GIFs. Frustrated, I became a beta user of a little-known tool called Copysmith. Copysmith helped me generate ad copy optimized for Facebook and Google ads, significantly reducing my time to run experiments. And clearly I wasn’t the only one; in 2021, Copysmith raised $10 million for its content generation platform powered by AI. A rival copywriting platform, Copy.ai, closed an $11 million round last year.
Creative AI has really shined in powering marketing use cases. Within the U.S. alone, advertising and marketing is a $230 billion industry. According to a survey by Phrasee, 63% of marketers surveyed “would now consider investing in AI to generate and optimize ad copy.” A MemSQL and O’Reilly survey found that 61% of marketerscite AI as the most important aspect of their larger data strategy.
“If AI progresses, it will be a source of empowerment and another tool that has uncapped potential. It is interesting in how it can unlock human capital, and in a smaller company that can’t afford full-time agencies, provide a quick, simple tool that solves their problem,” Copy.ai CEO Paul Yacoubian told TechCrunch.
