Generative AI Ecosystem Part I: End-User Applications
The Rise of Generative AI — a tour of the latest end-user Applications
Generative AI is all the rage — but how do keep up with all the news and tools?
This blog aims to help by providing a few key things:
- Overview of the key categories of companies and technologies
- A detailed analysis and comprehensive spreadsheet of key generative AI players and what they offer
If you are interested in Gen AI companies and tech-focused in developer tools check out our Gen AI Ecosystem Part II.
According to Google’s Bard technology, Generative AI is “a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content, such as text, images, audio, and video. It does this by learning patterns from existing data, then using this knowledge to generate new and unique outputs. Generative AI is capable of producing highly realistic and complex content that mimics human creativity, making it a valuable tool for many industries such as gaming, entertainment, and product design.”
Language is the cornerstone of human communication and has always been a challenge for machines to master. However, recent advances in generative AI technology — and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) such as chatGPT and GPT4 — can seemingly understand and generate human-like language with remarkable accuracy and clarity demonstrating almost true understanding.
LLM’s are already being used in various industries, such as healthcare, finance, and education, to name a few. But what about end-user-oriented applications? How can these technologies make the lives of all of us better, especially those of us who are knowledge workers and work in offices and use computers and mobile devices for most of our day?
In this blog, we’ll explore the different ways generative AI and LLMs can enhance office productivity, improve customer experiences, and provide personalized assistance to users in real-time. From virtual assistants that can schedule appointments and answer emails to chatbots that can help customers with their inquiries, the potential uses of these models are endless.
Market Analysis
Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize knowledge worker productivity by accelerating and augmenting many core knowledge worker activities.
To understand this rapidly expanding market better, we worked with our partners at Soko Solutions to analyze nearly 400 companies, tools, and open-source projects. For this blog, we will focus on the ~200 tools that are utilized by consumers or end-users and will differentiate between those tools utilized by technologists (e.g. coding/programming tools) or in an enterprise setting. This blog reviews 6 main areas:
- Content Creation
- Productivity & Automation
- Sales & Marketing
- Data & Analytics
- HR and Legal
- Other
Please note that we also analyzed some AI companies and technologies that are not strictly generative AI. When we found appropriate such companies we included them in the sheet and analysis for reference but did not highlight them as they are not the focus of this analysis and the blog.
General LLM Models
Large Language Models are sometimes known as foundational models — and provide a machine-learning presentation of language in general. Examples of LLMs are BERT, OpenAI’s GPT-3, GPT-4, Google’s T5, LaMDA and PaLM, Meta’s LLaMA, Anthropic’s CLAUDE, Open Source Falcon, Bloom, and more. Chatbot applications like Bard (by Google) and ChatGPT (by OpenAI) sit on top of an LLM and, as you know by now, are useful for a wide variety of tasks simply by prompting it or making a request in natural language.
For the purposes of this blog, we will refer to all generative text AI as LLM — and while this blog is focused on end-user technologies we won’t go into much detail on the chatBot applications or the foundational technologies.
Content Creation
Content creation is a major category in generative AI software. It uses machine learning to create unique and original content such as images, videos, music, and text. This technology streamlines the creative process and empowers creators to push the boundaries of what is possible. The key game-changing capability here is the ability to “prompt” the AI system by simply stating in a natural language a text request and have the system instantly produce a human-like generated image, video, music, or text passage. What’s truly remarkable is that while these systems are trained on huge amounts of data — the prompt enables the system to generate wholly new digital content never seen before. See this example below:
We reviewed ~50 companies and noted more than $915 M of funding has been invested in these companies — not including OpenAI — which has raised $11.3 B on its own. The below will highlight a few sub-categories of content creation — images, photo editing, video, text, and music:
Image
Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 are some of the most popular AI image generator software products today. They are all capable of creating amazing artwork, but each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Midjourney is excellent for digital artwork, producing very artistic results that lean towards fantasy style. DALL-E 2 is capable of creating photo-realistic images and adding or removing elements from existing images.
Photo Editing
PhotoRoom is a photo editing software that helps users create studio-quality images in seconds. It uses deep learning to translate pixels into objects, allowing users to remove, replace, or blur backgrounds, and delete unwanted features with a magic retouch tool.
Video
Synthesia and Descript are powerful AI video generator software. Synthesia is a platform for creating and editing video content using AI technology. Synthesia allows users to generate videos using text-to-speech technology and also offers capabilities like multilingual support and customization of video elements. In contrast, Descript is primarily a tool for editing audio and video files. Descript’s generative AI technology allows users to edit video content by simply editing the text, which the software then converts to video in real-time. Here’s an example of an interesting generated video by RunwayML, a company that provides easy-to-use AI tools for creators who may not have coding experience, making it possible for them to integrate AI into their workflow.
Text
Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriting tool that helps users generate high-quality and engaging written content for various purposes. It uses machine learning to analyze user inputs and create content in various languages and formats. Recently, Grammarly has announced its new product, GrammarlyGo, the suite of generative AI capabilities, that takes into account your context, preferences, and goals to instantly generate high-quality drafts, outlines, replies, and revisions when you need them. It will become available soon.
Music
Moises, Boomy, and Beatoven are all AI-powered music creation and editing tools, and while similar they serve different purposes. Moises enables users to adjust the levels of each instrument, change the tempo and key, and generate MIDI files from audio, it is useful for musicians who want to remix, sample, or study a particular song’s individual elements. Boomy allows users to create original music compositions by selecting a genre, mood, and instruments, it is useful for musicians who want to create original music tracks without having to play an instrument or have any music theory knowledge. Lastly, Beatoven allows users to create original music compositions by selecting a genre, mood, and tempo and it is most useful for musicians who want to create original music tracks quickly and easily. There’s also an example of Meta’s newly released Music Generator called MusicGen — which can generate music based on a text prompt.
Productivity & Automation
Generative AI can boost business productivity by automating tasks, improving communication and collaboration, and providing insights that can inform better decision-making. An AI-enabled workforce can increase productivity and be a game changer for every business, as discussed in this Forbes article. We reviewed ~33 companies and noted $592 M of funding has been invested in these companies. Some examples of the type of tools businesses can make use of are:
For Collaboration
Notion is one of the bigger players in this space, as the connected workspace where better, and faster work happens, enhanced with AI. It is an all-in-one workspace, that blends everyday work apps into one, it is used for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. On the other hand, we have Slite, a recently launched AI startup, which works as a knowledge base for fast access to trusted company information. It enables a rich knowledge base of your company’s digital information and enables team members to ask for information in a natural way and get back compact synthesized answers and skip hours of searching and reading thru documents.
For Meetings and Note-taking
Otter.ai helps save time by recording meeting audio, transcribing the meeting notes, automatically capturing slides, and generating summaries. By conducting such meeting transcriptions and summaries, it is able to increase productivity by 30x. Grain is also a transcription software that uses AI to facilitate note-taking and meeting summarizing, the difference between Grain and Otter is that Grain works better for people in customer-focused roles who need to understand and advocate the needs of their customers, and reviews mentioned better ease of use.
For Task Automation
Magical is a productivity app that uses AI to speed up repetitive tasks as you work. No integrations or APIs are required. As you work, the app speeds up repetitive tasks like messaging, data entry, and more. It can be used on any site like Salesforce, Zendesk, Gmail, LinkedIn, or any other website with its Chrome extension. Bardeen is another powerful automation tool. Bardeen helps you build and streamline automation for any of your business processes, recruiting, marketing, sales, prospecting, etc. Simply type in the desired workflow and watch how it generates the entire automation from scratch.
Sales & Marketing
Marketing and Sales tools use machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data and generate insights that can be used to improve marketing and sales strategies. They can also create personalized content, such as emails, social media posts, and product descriptions, based on customer preferences and behavior. By automating these processes, marketing and sales teams can save time and resources while improving the effectiveness of their campaigns. This McKinsey article gives a more comprehensive explanation of the various use cases. We reviewed ~40 companies and noted $450 M of funding has been invested in these companies.
Branded content creation
Jasper and Typeface are AI-powered writing tools that use machine-learning algorithms to generate on-brand content. However, Jasper is designed to handle a wider range of tasks, including content generation and AI image generation, while Typeface is more focused on generating short-form content like headlines and social media posts. Jasper offers a range of features such as personalized responses based on customer interactions, SEO optimization tools, and hundreds of customizable templates to choose from, and Typeface offers a plagiarism checker, a readability score, and a sentiment analysis tool, to help users ensure their content is accurate, engaging, and effective.
Website
Durable is an AI-powered platform that provides small business owners with a range of tools to build and run their businesses, including an AI website builder, marketing tools, customer management, invoicing, money management, reviews, insurance, and more, all in one place. Unbounce is an AI-powered landing page builder with smart features that let you create beautiful, high-performing marketing campaigns in just a few minutes, helping businesses turn billions of visitors into leads, sales, and signups.
Branding
Looka provides an AI-powered platform to create a brand identity from scratch starting with the logo. Users can design and purchase a logo and then use their Brand Kit to generate marketing materials like business cards, social media posts, letterheads, posters, and more. After your brand is ready, you can use Rembrand, a product placement platform that uses AI to place realistic-looking products in digital videos. Rembrand aims to automate the creation, distribution, targeting, and measurement of in-video product placement.
Sales
Regie.ai is an AI content platform that automates sales content creation and personalization, helps sales teams enhance their prospecting process by automating the creation of sales emails and sales pieces, and provides users with all their content when and where they need it. Lavender is a sales writing assistant that uses AI to improve the language, tone, and structure of sales emails and communication. The platform is designed to help sales professionals and teams save time and increase the effectiveness of their sales communication strategies. You can see a brief video demo here.
Data & Analytics
LLMs can be used to interact in a natural way with data for the purposes of conducting analysis and making it easier for businesses to make informed decisions. We reviewed 11 companies and noted $120 M of funding has been invested in these companies.
Seek, for example, calls itself “Generative AI for Data” and provides a solution where users can utilize natural language to ask anything out of your company’s data and get answers quickly and easily. You can see a video explanation here.
Another company in this space is Instabase which provides a complete solution coupled with industry expertise in a few particular areas including healthcare, insurance, and finance. They also offer a generative AI-based ability to converse with your documents, get answers, summarize content, analyze data, and automate workflows. Instabase has raised $45 M in funding so far.
HR and Legal
In the HR category, generative AI companies are developing solutions that can automate recruitment, employee engagement, and performance management processes. In the legal category, generative AI companies are developing solutions that can automate contract review, legal research, and compliance processes. These solutions are designed to help businesses and organizations save time and resources while increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of their HR and legal operations. We reviewed 20+ companies and noted $652 M of funding has been invested in these companies — with Eitghtfold having raised the majority of that at nearly $400 M.
HR
Eightfold is an AI-powered talent intelligence platform that uses machine learning algorithms to analyze candidate data and match them to relevant job openings. Eightfold is useful for companies that want to optimize their recruitment processes and improve employee retention and development.
Fetcher, on the other hand, is an AI-powered recruiting automation platform that automates the process of sourcing and engaging with candidates. Fetcher is useful for companies that want to save time and resources by automating the recruitment process and increasing the efficiency of their hiring operations.
Legal
One of the bigger companies in the field is DoNotPay, The World’s First Robot Lawyer. DoNotPay is a consumer advocacy platform that provides legal aid for various issues and uses chatbots and machine learning algorithms to provide free legal services and suggestions to its users.
Other
We analyzed 70 additional businesses and technologies representing ~$1B in investment in categories ranging from the general chatbot, gaming, education, medical, and other audio AI related. A few interesting examples include:
Conclusion
Generative AI is a fast-paced and exciting space with the opportunity to revolutionize how knowledge work is conducted — both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.
This analysis done here is by no means exhaustive — there are a number of other companies and technologies and new ones emerging all the time. If you feel we missed one — please message us.
If you are interested to learn more about the market landscape or want access to the full Google sheet of 400 companies and technologies, please reach out to us here.
