Just a quick episode to highlight my recent appearance on Dan Turchin‘s AI and the Future Work podcast. In the episode, we discuss my 2024 predictions both in general and with an unsurprising spin towards AI and the future of work. I think this is our third year running in getting together to discuss my predictions.
If you don’t know Dan’s podcast, you should. It’s one of the longest running founder/CEO podcasts in Silicon Valley with approximately 300 total episodes, an overall 4.9 rating, and some great reviews including this one from none other than Ben Horowitz: ”I love this podcast. Great guests and great discussions about AI, ethics, technology, and entrepreneurship.”
Guests of note in the past year have included Arvind Jain (Glean), May Habib (Writer), Robert Plotkin (AI legal expert), Vijay Tella (Workato), Dr. John Boudreau (Cornell), Tom Wheeler (former FCC chair), Wade Foster (Zapier), and Meredith Broussard (NYU).
In our discussion, Dan and I hit many topics, including:
- My self-ratings on my 2023 predictions, including discussion of which are cycles, extrapolations, and pendulums.
- A deeper dive on the “retain is the new add” 2023 prediction, looking at expansion ARR as a percent of new ARR as proof.
- The post-truth world and AI’s impact on it through synthetically-generated content, including discussion on SEO and generative AI optimization.
- History and future of algorithmically-generated feeds versus manual curation and how I sometimes find myself missing RSS.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and how its two key abilities (sourcing plus augmenting) help make generative AI much more appropriate for the enterprise.
- AI climbing the proverbial hype cycle, including funding rounds and their structure; new value-based pricing and how much of AI-created value will be captured by vendors versus customers.
- Fair use and large-language models (e.g., the New York Times complaint), including discussion of virtual SaaS expert pools such as SaaS GPT Lab.
- Battery’s now somewhat famous slide on GTM efficiency, arguing that a sales team of 75 people armed with AI tools can support the same quota as a 110-person team without. Be ready for the board meeting where they ask about this slide!
- The odds of both Dan and I attending the upcoming rumored performances of Dead & Company at The Sphere in Las Vegas.
I hope you make some time to listen to the episode. And thanks, Dan, for having me.