Prior to delivering a brief keynote and moderating a panel at the Global Family Offices Summit in Miami last week, I instinctively had a cursory glance at the artificial intelligence news du jour. Much to my dismay, it was an excruciating and depressing experience, with gloom and doom plastered on clickbait headlines about the AI bubble, deep fakes, and the endless grave of failed corporate pilots.
Herein lies the paradox: on the one hand, commentators shrug off the AI revolution as a pure speculative bubble, but on the other hand, they relentlessly assert dystopian visions of a post-humanist or transhumanist future where society is utterly machine-centric. This disturbing confusion does not contribute to a clear vision of the effect of the AI revolution. As I was interviewing an incredible panel of AI entrepreneurs, I was reminded that everything they were doing with AI was utterly human-centric.
Most AI entrepreneurs are not coming from Silicon Valley or a deep tech background. They come from other industries and are using technology to build meaningful, human-centric communities with empathic connections. The real issue is with corporate America, whose AI approach could not be more different from Main Street.
The pace of adoption is rather slow with the former because corporations are just trying to automate a few processes with AI. After the internet, the cloud, and robotic process automation, they believe they have found the new holy grail of automation.
But AI is a different kind of technology, one that people interact with using natural language and, increasingly, voice. This is not traditional software; it allows for more creativity. As such, organizations need to be restructured and reorganized around AI for this technology to be really fruitful, which explains the current sluggish pace of adoption from large corporations and the incredible achievements of small- and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs in the battlefield.
That is, as I put forth, all the more reason for investors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals to directly engage with AI entrepreneurs. These latter usually know only one source of financing: traditional venture capitalists.
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However, as AI is not just about software innovation, but also about applying technology to traditional businesses, and even building physical infrastructure, venture capital will not be enough to fund this revolution. Entrepreneurs should talk to family offices, which they customarily view as mere limited partners investing in venture capital funds. In particular, AI entrepreneurs should first help these investors understand the magnitude of the AI revolution, repositioning their portfolio for its consequences, and maybe streamlining sometimes obsolete internal processes. In creating this trust relationship, the AI entrepreneur will appear as an AI mentor to the family office, for instance.
This is the first step to a meaningful relationship that could lead to an investment. If we want more capital flow to AI entrepreneurs, attracting family offices and high-net-worth individuals is key.
Sebastien Laye is an economist and AI entrepreneur.
