18 July 2024
The other day I had a casual catch-up with my friend Freek and we ended up using google meet instead of WhatsApp. As soon as we joined, both our AI Notetakers also automatically joined. It made me laugh out loud. Such nerds.
Both of us had a different one and I don't even remember what his was called. When I have calls today, a variety of AI notetakers usually turn up, there seems to be an almost infinite number of them and they're all the same to me.
A16Z has made an (I'm sure non-exhaustive) overview of AI Scribes (Notetakers).
[Problem] Scribing is a very important but highly unloved task, that therefore is not done often enough and at subpar quality.
[Why now] It simply could not be automated to an acceptable quality without LLMs, but with LLMs it suddenly got SUPER EASY to automate.
It resulted in one of those Groupon like avalanches of completely undifferentiated products. The barriers to entry are zero, switching costs are also zero, and everyone's cost structure is exactly the same.
Therefore, these companies are desperately trying to own a workflow (ref again to my framework from last year) in some niche. Indeed, A16Z mentions they like "products that use an AI scribe as a wedge into vertical software."
I can picture the pitch decks of all of these companies (I already wrote two of the slides in [square brackets] above). The TAM is going to be massive, competition will be presented in either a 2x2 matrix or in a table with features, in such a way to make the product seem defensible.
But it won't be. In a market like this, the winner is not going to get more than 50% marketshare. And with this being such a low value-add layer over the frontier models, the question "why doesn't OpenAI do this?" is much more pertinent than "why doesn't google do this?" ever was in the cloud SaaS era.
To me this seems like a deeply non venture-scale space. But there is one company that is playing 4D Chess.
Recall.AI provides an API to build meeting bots. They provide the bot that joins meetings as a service, and connect to OpenAI and other models to do the transcribing. In the words of the founder:
Out of the companies in this market map, [Recall] powers:
I'm excited about that! I think big (defensible) winners in AI are going to be made in this middle layer.
For more on AI opportunities, read my post here.