{"id":297676,"date":"2024-03-13T06:32:19","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T13:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/?p=297676"},"modified":"2024-03-11T19:43:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T02:43:34","slug":"how-to-solve-unsolvable-problems-with-generative-ai-for-startups-with-google-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/how-to-solve-unsolvable-problems-with-generative-ai-for-startups-with-google-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Solve Unsolvable Problems with Generative AI for Startups with Google Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is Generative AI going to be transformative or incremental for your startup? Are you re-vampimg your entire product roadmap, or sprinkling AI in along the way? A panel of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/category\/topics\/ai\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AI-driven<\/a> organizations took the stage at SaaStr Annual to talk about the trends and opportunities of GenAI and how it\u2019s shaped their companies.<\/p>\n<p>In this session you&#8217;ll hear from:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ravi Rajamani, Managing Director and Global Head of GenAI at Google<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Lilian Breidenbach, Co-founder and Managing Director of Legal OS<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Harpinder Singh, Partner at Innovation Endeavors<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Sarah Al-Hussaini, Co-founder and COO at Ultimate<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a startup, one of the more complicated things you can do is integrate AI into your product roadmap because of the speed of evolution of the tech itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-LMt6o4aNeA?si=_LNEKWsE1FLZ0nQN\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Keeping up with the Speed of Generative AI<\/span><\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At Legal OS, they\u2019re building an AI-powered legal assistant for revenue-driving functions. It\u2019s been a very radical process for them. Almost overnight, with the emergence of LLMs, a previously unsolvable problem became solvable.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the end of last year, <strong>they scrapped their entire roadmap and almost 90% of their code base<\/strong>. They were building a product almost from scratch thanks to the introduction of GenAI.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If that sounds like a painful experience, it was. It was also the right way to go. Should you scrap your entire roadmap and pivot? That depends on whether GenAI will be transformative or incremental for your product.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If it\u2019s incremental, there\u2019s low risk. You can test many open-source technologies, and you probably don\u2019t care that GPT4 is expensive and slow because your usage will be low.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If it\u2019s transformational, like for Legal OS and Ultimate, it becomes an existential discussion. Ask yourself:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ul style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Do you want control over the technology?\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Do you want to build your own LLM and build it in-house?\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Is time-to-market absolutely critical for you?\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If so, you will be wrestling with something open-source while making a plan of action to make it long-term. It\u2019s very easy to build a cool demo, but to get from that 80% to 100% that\u2019s honest, in scope, and controllable requires a Herculean effort.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>Key pieces of advice for founders:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<ol style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Assess the risk profile of your customer base. Will they be ok with a better product that can go off-piste while you work out the kinks, or does it need to be production-ready from day one?\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Think very ambitiously about how much resource you dedicate to this. If the technology allows you to solve a customer pain point much easier and better, you need to go all in if you have confidence in your team and are early enough in your organization to do it.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can iterate much quicker if you allow people within the entire organization to prototype, not just the engineering team. The beauty of startups is you\u2019re agile, and with LLMs, it\u2019s language-driven.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A VC Perspective \u2014 How Should Startups Approach GenAI<\/span><\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Generative AI is moving extremely fast, yet the basic things around having the right team, the right market, and a solution that\u2019s 10x better are equally as relevant today as ever. So, as a startup, you need to think deeply about the customer experience and what GenAI can do for you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many startups build a thin layer on top of OpenAI or whatever stack. You need to think about the durability and defensibility of your value prop, especially as these GenAI models get better. As a founder, you can\u2019t differentiate yourself if you only sprinkle AI into the product.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Deep customer empathy and real transformational use cases are where the magic lies. The beauty and the curse of this market is that everyone has access to the same toolkit. How much can you incorporate customer feedback and improve your models?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Speed and a nimble team that can out-execute everyone will win.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Challenges and Opportunities of GenAI<\/span><\/h2>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At Ultimate, customer service is the number one industry disrupted by AI, especially GenAI, making the experience more human. Currently, the industry is rudimentary, but as it evolves, it will make it incredibly easy for support teams to deploy bots that work across channels, languages, and systems and solve 80% of customer requests in a human-like way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Over the next 12-18 months, Ultimate will make chatbots launch faster, with less effort to manage, and they\u2019ll go live without all the extra work. The experience will be much more human-like, so much so that people will struggle to know whether they\u2019re communicating with a human or a machine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For Legal OS, the people who buy and set up their product are legal compliance teams. If you give them an AI product, that\u2019s a black box. They\u2019re not going to use it unless it\u2019s accurate and secure. From the beginning, you have to focus on making this AI steerable and auditable. You might also have to sacrifice the speed of response to ensure accuracy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you can build a steerable, auditable, and very secure AI, then these risk-averse teams can develop a tremendous amount of trust in the product and deploy it quickly and widely.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The only advantage startups had in the past was moving fast. They could take risks that Google couldn\u2019t. Now, the toolkit is democratized, so anyone can build a prototype and put something up within 30-90 days. Companies of all sizes claim everything, so it isn\u2019t easy to differentiate yourself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>The takeaway:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s easy to claim you have all this stuff, and as a startup, you have to be very savvy on GTM. It\u2019s exciting to be working at the cutting edge of technology and to be the one defining patterns. No one knows what it\u2019ll do to the industry, so speed is critical. In addition to speed, you want to play the long game. Looking at previous waves like Cloud and data, we\u2019re in the 15th year of Cloud, and it\u2019s still not done. Choose good long-term partners, speed, and a GTM for Acts II and III.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-LMt6o4aNeA?si=1O2YdnWaRy7yBGvz\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" data-load-mode=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Head of Generative AI at Google talks about the trends and opportunities of GenAI for SaaS Startups with Legal OS, Innovation Endeavors and Ultimate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":297683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpscp_schedule_draft_date":"","_wpscp_schedule_republish_date":"","_wpscppro_advance_schedule":false,"_wpscppro_advance_schedule_date":"","_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"","_twitter_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type":"","_pinterest_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"","_medium_share_type":"","_threads_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[]},"categories":[24898,31,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-blog-posts","category-early"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.saastr.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Screenshot-2024-03-11-at-7.39.05-PM.png?fit=1000%2C564&quality=70&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5oib2-1fre","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saastr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}