It’s officially fall, autumn, sweater weather, Gilmore Girls time—whatever you want to call it.
And if there’s one thing our previous trips around the sun have taught us, it’s this: The year is essentially over now. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s…it’s all one week long. ☺️
Thus, let’s do a little seasonal check-in on the state of AI in finance.
Way back in August, Gartner released a report measuring the state of emerging technologies, focused on generative AI in finance. Its verdict was that compared to other AI-related tech, generative AI was “at the very peak of inflated expectations,” and the firm anticipated “disillusionment with GenAI tools in finance in the future.”
How’s that holding up? Well, for starters, the company fueling a lot of the early generative AI hype is raking it in. OpenAI just closed its long-anticipated funding round with a $157 billion valuation. Good for her.
And all the usual suspects—namely the tech companies backing OpenAI and otherwise intentionally fueling the AI hype cycle—are still AI evangelists. Elsewhere, though, even tech-savvy startups are acknowledging that this whole change-the-world business is going to take longer than expected. And the AI cynics can come in and whisper “if it ever happens at all.”
At a Goldman Sachs tech conference in September, Airbnb CFO Ellie Mertz noted that while the travel company continues “to be extremely excited about the possibility of leveraging GenAI to deliver a better travel experience, both from a planning perspective [and on the trip side],” it acknowledges “that a lot of the really transformative applications are going to probably take longer than maybe we all expected a year ago with a lot of hype.”
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And even Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services—the company’s cloud computing division—speaking at the same conference, noted that “the early splashes of generative AI” ultimately “miss the actual value that you’re going to get.” Translation: The company is still bullish, but the full value hasn’t been unlocked yet.
Meanwhile, Booking Holdings, the travel company, at, yes, the same conference, did the obligatory “GenAI is going to be transformative for the world” spiel—and that’s a direct quote.
But, tellingly, as the company’s CFO, Ewout Steenbergen, explained some of the company’s current generative AI undertakings, he noted that it “deliberately didn’t say so much during the second quarter, because at some point we said let’s not talk conceptual about GenAI. The next time we talk about it, we need to give concrete examples: This is what we have done and this is how many hours we have saved or dollars we have saved, and to be a little bit more specific.”
This sentiment is also what makes the timing of OpenAI’s valuation news interesting, at this stage in the hype cycle. Companies aren’t backing down from AI investments, but now that the power player has raised all that money, will we see more candor from companies about what generative AI can actually do for them? And will the answer be not that much, really?
It’s called a dispatch for a reason—we’ll have to wait and see.