There are advantages to stretching out conversations into a broader context, such as here with Evans putting some hedges and caveats into his perspectives that don’t always show up in the condensed version in his newsletters.
Not to say he sounds less authoritative, because his speculation is better than most as to how AI tech will or won’t become a business. It’s not his first rodeo…to paraphrase his references to past “very unknown” circumstances in tech development.
Evans notes three phases of AI development, and notes we are already moving past phase one of implementation by corporations. Which was using AI to do the same things as prior, but using AI to make them work “better:.
Now he’s saying corporations are in phase two where the effort is to find new things that AI can do that weren’t done before. Then he notes a third phase, which at this point is just “nobody knows” where it’s going to go.
Towards the end of this lengthy discussion, Evans notes he is preparing a presentation for a large Retailer Association conference upcoming in the fall, and he’s still working out his ideas. (He says he thinks in “slides”)
See a followup post with a ChatGPT analysis of the transcript. (Which perhaps might help Evans with his slides thinking and upcoming presentations.)