| The iPhone celebrates its 17th birthday this month. I can just about remember being given a Blackberry by my then employer, but I hardly ever used it. I’ve been traveling a lot the last few weeks and I’ve used my iPhone to check in for my flights, to hold my boarding passes and other tickets, to summon rideshares, to find my way around, to tap and pay, you name it. It seems completely normal to have a powerful computer in my pocket, but it took a few years to get there. I don’t think it will take anything like as long for generative AI to become completely commonplace. As I argue in this piece, we are very rapidly approaching the point at which any martech vendor of note will have an AI assistant plus other relevant genAI capabilities. GenAI then ceases to be a differentiator. GenAI will soon seem as commonplace as email. Does that mean AI isn’t a game changer? No, it just means we don’t yet know which games it is going to change and how. Kim Davis
Editor at large | 