Nov 26, 2024 3 min read

AI Backlash, SMB Adoption Barriers, Top Enterprise Uses

Dialog: Exchange Number 9

AI Trust Gap

Every over-hyped technology is inevitably followed by a backlash. And AI is no exception. From analysts questioning AI's ROI to job displacement anxiety to Gen Z fears to the Coke AI Xmas ad backlash and negative reactions to AI in product descriptions, people are expressing ambivalence or open hostility toward AI.

Dialog's consumer survey, which asks about search vs. AI usage, presents a complex and fascinating picture of AI adoption with less consumer ambivalence on display. (Dialog members will get access next week.) In contrast, a recent multi-country survey from brand consultancy Lippincott uncovered a major consumer-AI trust gap.

Almost half of Lippincott's 11K respondents (46%) said they would "trust a brand less if they learned that it was using AI to provide services they assumed were coming from a human." This argues for transparency, but it doesn't bode well for brands seeking to swap out humans for AI in customer-facing roles (e.g, customer service). And only 7% said they would pay more for AI-enhanced products.

"I trust this brand to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools"

Finally, 52% of respondents said that they "don’t perceive brands using AI as any more innovative than those that do not." The flip side, of course, is that 48% do perceive them to be more innovative.

It's important to remember that surveys and actual behavior are often different. But what all this means is that consumer brands must proceed judiciously in their adoption, deployment and messaging around AI. On the B2B side, the situation is quite different and much more positive for AI and AI receptiveness.

News & Noteworthy

Siri getting the LLM treatment to make it more conversational and competitive.
Will "paid search" become a dominant AI business model?
Anthropic introduces new open source standard to improve AI responses.
Salesforce CEO: we're on the brink of the "agentic age."
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon's utopian and arguably naive view of AI.
There's an accountant shortage; AI Startup Fondo aims to fill the gap.
AI image generation is getting more sophisticated and controllable.
Uber building a global gig labor force for AI labeling.
Enterprise AI spending: $13.8 billion this year vs. $2.3 billion in 2023.
Estee Lauder using ChatGPT to help develop new beauty products.
~54% of longer English posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated.

Barriers to AI Adoption

Our most recent SMB survey (with Alignable) found that nearly 40% of very small businesses (<10 headcount) were using AI tools. Marketing, as expected, was the dominant use case. But what about the non-adopters?

We asked about the main reasons or barriers to adoption. Interestingly, the top reason was a philosophical one: "opposed to AI doing the work of humans." It's possible that hides other factors. But most of the other reasons expressed go to inexperience or lack of knowledge. When asked if they planned to implement AI in 2025, just over half of this group said "no," while 47% said they intended to.

Code Generation Top AI Use Case

Marketing, sales, product development and customer service are some of the top SMB use cases for AI tools. However Menlo Ventures found a mostly different set of applications in the enterprise.

In order, the top enterprise use cases are: code generation, support chatbots, search and retrieval, data extraction, meeting summarization, copywriting, image generation, coaching, workflow automation and web research automation.