OpenAI launched a Sales Agent in Japan together with SoftBank. Why should a Belgian AI start-up lose sleep over that?
First, what the Sales Agent does: it processes data submitted through a sales form on a website, enriches it with relevant information such as address, company size and sector, and then schedules a meeting with the relevant parties. Useful for sales departments. But more important for every Belgian start-up working with AI.
Why? Flash back to the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. It caused blind panic at Google. Did ChatGPT mean the end of the search engine? A few months later, an internal document from a Google employee leaked. Its title: 'We have no moat. And neither does OpenAI.'
Neither OpenAI nor Google can defend itself against the rapid evolution of generative AI, the author argued, because there is a much bigger competitor: the open-source community. Open-source models are faster, more adaptable, better for privacy and increasingly capable.
An idea OpenAI's CEO always resisted, logically, with a billion-dollar valuation to justify. But with the Sales Agent launch, the strategy appears to be shifting: from one big model to conquer the world, toward a portfolio of applications built on that model.
That switch is crucial for Belgian start-ups. OpenAI's applications will become direct competitors of solutions Belgian start-ups are bringing to market today. The thinner the layer a start-up builds on top of the model, the bigger the chance it gets competed away by OpenAI itself.
Our advice for Belgian start-ups: focus on vertical niches, and inject niche domain knowledge into your AI applications. That way you carve out a piece of the market that is too small and too detailed for a giant like OpenAI to bother with.
Deep domain knowledge is not just a differentiator. Increasingly, it is the only defensible moat there is.