Twice a year, Benedict publishes a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry, and the latest came out a few weeks ago. These days, that means AI. What's new and what are the big questions? 

How do you know what AI will do to your industry? Your company? Your job? The easy, obvious answer is to add up the things you do that can be automated, but it’s probably better to ask how the job will change, and to ask what your job really means. Is AI tackling the easy part or the hard part? What are your customers really buying? 

OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and it can’t invent all of those itself. What’s the plan?

What does AI do to software? What's a more interesting answer than 'no, this won't kill SaaS'? And what comes after the euphoria? 

OpenAI has all the mindshare and 800m weekly active users, but the models remain commodities and platforms with their own distribution are coming up fast. How will it compete? How will any of this work? How can you differentiate AI? 

It's time for Benedict's annual Tech Trends presentation. What's new, what's boring, what are the new questions? 

How can billion dollar chatbots differentiate when they're all doing the same thing in the same way?

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Why is tech into F1, and why is F1 into tech? 

It's easy to say what tech companies want from AI, but much harder to talk about the product strategy - they're all pretty much the same. "Just build a better model!" Where does that go? Can they differentiate? What would it mean to differentiate a product that can do 'everything' - what would different everythings be? 

For the past decade, Benedict has given an annual presentation on the state of technology, and he did the latest at Slush in Helsinki last month. In this episode we discuss some of the challenges and issues that he tried to cover.

You can find the full presentation here - https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations 

Benedict went from being a consultant to an analyst to having his own business, but in essence, he's always been an analyst. Toni went from policy to consultancy, then from B2B sales to Formula 1. After four years of doing the podcast, we thought it would be interesting to sit down and discuss how we got here and talk all things Formula 1.