The tech world is agog with the latest developments in AI, but it appears that the business side isn’t necessarily all that enthused.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has said that corporate customers aren’t very excited about AI. “One fact about the recent AI hype is that corporate customers and analysts are not terribly excited,” he wrote on X. “They are in a “prove it to me” mode, as they should be. I am in the camp that overhyping anything is a bad idea. I am personally enthusiastic about some technologies but I will not overhype them,” he added.
Vembu also added a word of caution that excitement about the AI space might be getting overheated. “There are some warning signs of the AI bubble deflating,” he said. He shared two recent headlines to substantiate his claim. “1. MSN: “Microsoft reportedly cancels US data center leases amid oversupply concerns” 2. Satya Nadella cautions against overly optimistic projections about AI, in particular about AGI (AI that is super human in every dimension)”.
It’s an interesting perspective, and is different from all the hype about AI that we’ve seen in recent times. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the best programmer in the world will by an AI by the end of this year. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI will soon enable a century’s worth of scientific research in 5-10 years, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that AI is progressing much faster than Moore’s law. But Zoho has thousands of businesses as its clients, and likely has a firsthand view of how businesses are viewing AI.
The lack of enthusiasm over AI among business customers could be due several factors. One could be a simple time lag — AI is getting better so quickly that products that leverage it are still being built on technology that isn’t cutting edge, and products that use today’s technology might only be commercially available six months from now. Also, AI outputs aren’t deterministic, and can sometimes be inaccurate, which could mean that they aren’t yet useful for business customers. But if Sridhar Vembu is indeed right, and businesses take longer to adopt AI than the tech industry is assuming, it could lead to some short-term pain for the tech sector in the coming quarters.