Adoption

Right now, every time I face a question at Intelligems — be it a feature, be it making an investment, be it discussing a role — I end up with the question "could this be done by an agent?" Because, really, what can't AI do at this point?

I've tried to answer this rhetorical question (Seriously, what can't AI do?) a few times. Every time, I land on something that someone's already figured out how to do, or I'm pretty sure it's a use case that will get solved within six months.

In short, AI is pretty capable.

I read an interesting report from Anthropic on this topic. Contained in this report is a graphic that charts AI's theoretical capabilities relative to real-world adoption. No surprise, the theoretical capabilities are quite high but the real world adoption is quite low (except amongst us coding nerds).

This got me thinking about a parallel to Intelligems.¹

Over the last five years, we've spent a lot of energy expanding the surface area of what ecommerce brands can optimize — pricing, checkout, upsells, landing pages, shipping rates, cart mechanics, offers … the list goes on. The spider chart of what's possible has gotten a lot bigger.

But when I look at how our customers are actually using the platform, our own adoption is similarly limited. Most customers are working on one or two of those dimensions, barely going beyond the tip of the iceberg with respect to functionality. Akin to how most of the world hasn't fully adopted AI yet even though the capabilities exist.

Our spidergraph might look something like this:

How do we unlock all this uncaptured value for brands?

While I can't answer that question for Anthropic and AI adoption writ large, the answer for Intelligems (ironically) is AI! When I ask our customers Why haven't you tried [X] yet? the response is either a skill gap or a will gap. They lack expertise or they lack time.

It turns out that AI (the Intelligems AI, that is!) is chock full of expertise. And time is also a non-issue. Imagine if instead of having to comb through your site data to synthesize it into insights, generate ideas for opportunities, build the experiences, and run and monitor tests, all of that could be done for you?

AI, despite its own adoption gaps to close, is the mechanism that unlocks the full value of Intelligems for brands. And I'm excited to see those gaps close for us.

1  I can't really think about anything anymore without trying to relate it back to Intelligems, unfortunately.