LLMs (and generative AI generally) have an important feature: broad adoption of LLMs doesn’t require a change in consumer behaviour. LLMs are a complementary technology. We can deploy them right now to the cloud, to people’s smartphones and into enterprise software stacks.

The iPhone’s success fostered a narrative: that swift widespread change of consumer behaviour would be inevitable if the promise was there. But in reality, the unprecedented rise of mobile was overdetermined: the hardware was finally good enough (after decades of development) at the same time that the internet was finally changing consumer behaviour (after many false starts).

Crypto and VR proponents have been selling them as a wave of technology about to break over our heads. But adoption in their current forms requires consumers to adopt new behaviours — buying (and using) costly barely-good-enough headsets, or changing their financial arrangements. I don’t doubt that we’ll see these technologies changing people’s lives in the future, but it won’t happen until the transition becomes easier for consumers to swallow. Making Crypto and VR not worth betting your balance sheet on.

LLMs are different. LLM-powered services can sit alongside all existing software stacks, seamlessly providing functionality that wasn’t possible before. Consumers continue using their cloud-backed web and mobile apps and as far as the customer is concerned, their software got better without them having to do anything.

In this way, LLMs are more like the move to cloud. Cloud-powered features first showed up as options within our traditional desktop apps. “Share” or “Save to Cloud” buttons (with the floppy disk icon, naturally). Users didn’t need to know what it all meant, they could just opt-in to the new functionality alongside their existing workflows. Eventually, consumer’s came to intuit the new model, and apps changed, but it was a gradual process.

Each technology has its own path to adoption. Growth of LLM-powered services will be smoother than cloud, as it doesn’t need big-bang digital transformations. It’s possible to re-write individual functions within an existing system to take advantage of LLMs. The tech is complementary to our current cloud, web and mobile platforms.

Clear Line Tech’s expert team is actively designing, building and deploying LLMs to save costs and increase sales for major brands. We’d love to talk to you about how LLMs can give your business an edge.