The ‘On-Command’ Economy
Forecasting the Future of Convenience
Technology’s purpose is to make our lives easier. With each new advance in technology, we’ve seen a multitude of services spring up that take advantage of the change to make our lives better and easier.
Some of the most successful tech startups of the last few decades have been able to leverage and ride off of the exponential growth of a new technological platform. In the 70s and 80s the personal computer created the platform for businesses like Microsoft and Cisco to sell the required software and hardware and become tech giants as a result. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the Internet created powerhouses such as Amazon, eBay, and Skype. In the mid-2000s, the growth of mobile, smartphones in particular, saw many apps become billion dollar brands riding off of the growth of this new platform, such as Uber, Whatsapp, and Instagram. We’re now at the cusp of a new tech revolution: robot assistants.
Often times after we become accustomed to these new platforms and services, we can’t imagine what life was like before them. People who grew up in the 90s will recall spending their teenage years without a cell phone and communicating through landlines and pagers, which was absolutely normal back then, but within just 20 years this seems unbelievable today, almost as antiquated as the typewriter. Similarly as technology progresses and in the near future AI assistants are ubiquitous and used for nearly everything, we will wonder how we ever lived without them.
However, the biggest issue at the moment with voice based AI assistants is that because they are naturally extremely open ended, it makes them not really that good at anything. History has shown that the best services are those that focus on solving one problem with a compelling solution and then expand from there. So far there has been a lot of hype around digital assistants and chatbots with no real discernible value.
Today voice assistants can tell you the weather, play your music, read you a wikipedia entry, or in limited cases order you something on Amazon which you’ll get several days later, nothing really to write home about. However, what I believe will be the biggest value from these assistants will stem from what I call the ‘On-Command Economy’. This means the ability to order goods by simply saying what you need and magically having it appear right away. The assistant would understand and parse the request, order the product, arrange delivery and have it seamlessly arrive in front of you. As easy as request, receive, repeat.
I believe the next few years will see this massive shift towards the ‘On-Command Economy’. Artificial intelligence assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa are creating the platform and setting the stage for the next generation of services and startups to create these magical experiences. The best of these propositions will be able to leverage this new conversational platform to offer customers specific services ‘on-command’.
Legacy on-demand delivery startups like Postmates, Doordash, Deliveroo and Instacart leveraged mobile to make it easy to get food and groceries by browsing through a menu and tapping a few times to place an order. While other more recent startups like Magic, Operator, and GoButler tried to extend that simplicity and convenience to getting anything, but failed because they both overpromised and underdelivered. In the end they couldn’t fulfil the promise of a seamless experience that is both sustainable as a business and compelling as a proposition.
It will be very difficult for these players and other established incumbents to take advantage of this massive opportunity. Just like how Kodak couldn’t capitalize on digital photography even though they invented it; or how IBM couldn’t realize the true value of software; or how Skype failed to become the default instant messaging app when the shift to mobile happened; what will be required to succeed with this new platform is fresh thinking and a native approach to the ‘On-Command Economy’. Businesses that focus on creating the best, most seamless and convenient experience while leveraging the AI assistant platform within a specific vertical will be the ones who succeed and eventually dominate the space.
As we move further towards a future reliant on AI assistants and their platforms to access products and services, I believe that there is massive potential for players who get in early and leverage this new platform’s exponential growth.
