THINK Kollective — Riding the Fear Cycle into the Future.

The first Gartner Hype Cycle was created by Jackie Fenn (an analyst at Garnter) in 1995. I discovered the Garter Hype Cycle in the early 2000s when I was an analyst at Deloitte. I have frequently used it since then to understand the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications. Which technologies to keep a close eye on? Which ones to deep dive into? Which ones to invest in? and Which ones to evaluate sceptically? Like most analyst tools, the Hype Cycle isn’t always right but it helps evaluate which technologies are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. I have observed that the relative position of technologies on the curve at a given point in time is usually not a good indicator of their potential impact in the future. But, how fast a technology moves on the curve is a fairly certain indicator of their potential impact.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, I want to show you exactly how fast Generative AI has gone from hype to reality. From just an ‘inflated expectation’ to having a real impact on business outcomes.

This is the Gartner Hype Cycle from 2022 — this shows the Generative AI dot just shy of the peak of inflated expectations. It’s coloured light blue, which means analysts expect it to start having a meaningful impact on business outcomes in the next 2 to 5 years.

As they say, rest is history! November 2022 will be remembered as a seminal month in the history of technology and maybe even history of mankind. ChatGPT3 and Midjourney v4 were both released in November 2022 and we all know what a profound impact these and other Generative AI tools are having on almost every industry today. What’s even more fascinating (and scary!) is how Generative AI wave has pushed multiple technologies on this curve to the impact/productivity zone. We are seeing a tectonic change in how we learn, how we store and retrieve information, how we assimilate information, how we create, and how we work.

As a technologist, entrepreneur, and an analyst in my past life, I fancy myself a tech industry observer. It’s a hobby that keeps one quite busy. Innovative tech giants, new startups, and creative makers release thousands of products every year. A large number of them are a twist on the existing — better UX or a better process, cheaper than before, integrated with other popular tools to make your life easy, etc. Once in a while you see a product that is transformative for a particular job role or a business function. But, almost none of them make you wonder if life will ever be the same again!

Over the last few months, I have traversed a whole range of emotions — indifference (just another AI/ML paradigm) — incredulity (it can do what!?) — alarm (it can do what!?!?) — confusion (how does it work? how wide is the impact?) — fear (the impact is wide and deep) — realisation (this is going to change everything) — exploration. In an ode to the Hype Cycle, I am going to call this the Fear Cycle. I am sure most of you have traversed a similar journey or are somewhere in the middle of the ‘Fear Cycle’.

Which brings me to the point of it all, this is an invite for a ‘make sense of it all’ party. THINK Kollective is a community of professionals (engineers, marketeers, artists, physicians, chartered accountants, lawyers, physicists, biologists, etc.) who are curious about Generative AI. If you would like to explore and learn Generative AI tech/tools, to understand how you might use Generative AI to stay on top of your game then come join us.

Here’s a list of things we will be doing to understand, quantify, and maybe even prepare for the changes that Generative AI will affect. We would love to have you along for the ride. Please reach out if you would like to partake.

Experiments — reproduce papers, implement projects with open source code bases to understand the technology and its applications.

Impact assessments — interviews, podcasts, videos of conversations with industry, domain and tech experts on potential impacts and their perspective on how they expect the landscape to evolve.

POC implementations — partner with companies to identify interesting applications and help them with building a proof of concept.

Workshops — workshops with colleges as well as corporates to get them off the fence and experimenting.

Hackathons — organise hackathons at tech and non-tech colleges to encourage students to experiment and innovate. Also, learn from them.