When Everything is AI, Nothing is AI (Premium)

Just weeks into the AI era and we’ve already reached its conclusion: every product and service imaginable is adding AI capabilities whether it makes sense or not. This differentiator has suddenly just become table stakes. And it doesn’t blur the definition of AI, it obviates it. Call it an AI identity crisis.

Microsoft’s Microsoft 365 AI announcements today are the perfect example: Microsoft is bringing generative AI capabilities to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more with its new Microsoft 365 Copilot, because of course it is. Just like Google is bringing new generative AI capabilities to its Google Workspace productivity suite, starting with Gmail and Google Docs. These products are the obvious choices because they are used for content creation, and the recent AI boom is all about content creation.

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have always competed, with similar apps---word processors, spreadsheets, presentation makers, and so---and overlapping capabilities. And now … they still do. Both are adding generative AI capabilities. One might be better than the other in certain ways, as has always been the case. And the other will be better in other ways. Again, as before.

Granted, it’s been a while since office productivity suites have leapfrogged each other in a bid to win the market. But there are more recent examples of this competitiveness that are perhaps a better comparison to what we’re seeing today.

For example, when Google Docs and the other Workspace apps first appeared, they offered real-time collaboration functionality that put Microsoft Office to shame. This was a byproduct of the Microsoft products being legacy software designs that were hard to retrofit with this feature. So the software giant started first with the newer web versions of those apps. And then slowly---and, frankly, poorly—real-time collaboration arrived across the board.

Another example is the chat-based collaboration feature that was popularized by Slack at a time when the only semi-equivalent usage in the Microsoft 365 space was users emailing documents around in Outlook in a round-robin fashion. Microsoft’s response was Microsoft Teams, which has quickly grown into a gigantic superset of Slack and its most successful new platform in eons. But chat-based collaboration is now a thing. If you don’t have this, you can’t compete in this space.

And that’s what AI is. I started to write “and that’s all AI is,” but that’s not fair: we haven’t seen advances this big in the productivity space in decades. It is a big deal. But it’s also just a thing that everyone will have. If you don’t have this, you can compete in the content creation space.

And I do mean that broadly. Generative AI capabilities are coming to content creation tools of all kinds, and they will span all available platforms, from the desktop to mobile to the web. They will be used for textual information, for graphical information...