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, for video, and for every conceivable form of interaction that we engage in online. This is what I meant when I wrote that AI isn’t so much a “wave,” as I first theorized, but rather an ingredient in everything else that we use. It will enhance existing platforms, products, and services. You know, like MSG.

(This reality is good news for Microsoft 365, as it will retain its advantages over competitors. But it’s bad news for Bing. Once all search engines have AI and chatbots and whatever other nonsense, Bing will just be … Bing. Again. And not interesting.)

But in our evolving understanding of AI and how it will impact us, it is the sheer pervasiveness of AI, the way it will permeate almost literally everything that also makes AI, as both a term and a product, essentially invisible and pointless as a standalone concern. AI isn’t a thing, per se, or won’t be soon enough, in the same way that we don’t concern ourselves with CPU registers or Internet tunneling topography. It will be infrastructure. An assumption. Always there. In almost everything.

Put another way, Microsoft and others will incessantly market AI for all its worth for as long as it makes sense to do so. But I feel like that time frame is short, that as soon as months from now, the very notion of marketing AI will seem tired and passé.  Come on, admit it. You’re already tired of it. Cynical even.

But that doesn’t undercut the wonderful advances we’re going to see in products and services that, frankly, were getting tired and old, or, like certain Microsoft 365 and Windows 11 components, have been getting silly updates that didn’t make our work more efficient. AI, for all its problems, will at least make us more productive.

And that was the point of these tools in the first place. For all the problems with AI, this, at least, is a good thing.