A company called SellCell did a premature survey in which 73% of iPhone respondents and 87% of Samsung respondents said that AI adds little or no value, but there are several problems with this survey. One is that certain iPhone features were just released at the end of October which means the vast majority of iPhone users missed out on the recent improvements and likely were confused about the topic. While the Samsung technology has been around since March, most Samsung users (53.1%) had yet to use any of the AI features.
This significantly degrades the quality of the results because the majority of the respondents had never even used the AI tools, so the stats related to tool use are likely way out of step. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. The tech market isn’t a “build it and they will come” market. Interest in AI is trending down largely because no one is aggressively promoting smartphone AI use at the moment. Let me explain
The Problems with AI
There are a number of major issues with AI at the moment. These include a lack of experience with the related tools, AIs that are rapidly changing (good and bad), a lack of focus on AI output quality, and a lot of emphasis on AI taking jobs. In short, the majority of people don’t trust the technology and for good reason.
Much like we told people they needed to learn Boolean logic in order to properly search on the web (most people didn’t learn it), with AI, you need to learn how to prompt the AI properly, completely, and accurately in order to get good results. For those who speak precisely, this isn’t a huge issue, but most people don’t speak precisely. They leave it up to the listener to interpret what they mean. Even though this typically ends badly, we don’t focus on fixing the related problem.
So, to make AI valuable, users have to be able to trust the results, not feel like they are putting their job at risk by using it, be pulled into using AI, and be trained how to use AI effectively. Virtually none of this is happening at the moment (with Copilot being somewhat of the exception when it comes to coding, though, even there, quality is suffering).
The Decline of Marketing
Back in the 1990s when both PCs and Client Server computing expanded dramatically, marketing for tech was well funded. There were multiple tech magazines, CNET was a huge media powerhouse, and people regularly lined up to be the first to buy new products as a result of the marketing-driven initiatives that pulled people into new technologies and products at impressive rates. Since then, marketing has been largely defunded and understaffed. Even Apple, which has held on the longest, appears to be losing loyalty.
This creates a huge problem for AI. Typically, marketing would keep users focused on the positives of AI that would balance out the problems associated with its birth. Every new offering goes through some growing pains. AI is no different, but the lack of marketing means the negatives of the technology appear to be overwhelming the positive aspects.
This is most noticeable with autonomous cars where the interest in the technology declined precipitously due to the imbalance of negative and positive coverage favoring the negative, and autonomy in machines and robots is connected at the hip to how people perceive AI technology in general.
Wrapping Up:
AI isn’t doing well. We are currently on an AI bubble, but if the interest in AI isn’t reinforced, it is likely that we’ll see a sharp pull-back in the technology in 2025 with devastating results for the valuations of companies who are driving this massive AI technology wave. While the technology’s rapid advancement should be able to fill the bubble before it pops making any correction either unlikely or minor, this potential drop in interest could instead result in a major market correction as individuals and companies pull back from AI.
Thus, it is critical that marketing be funded and staffed to promote the benefits and use of AI broadly before most of these AI efforts collapse due to distrust and disinterest.
