Louis Lehot, Partner and Business Lawyer at Foley & Lardner LLP, hosted a live-stream webinar for startup founders and investors in 2023, a year marked as the era of generative AI. New software, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Bard, collectively created one of those rare "This is going to change everything!" moments in Silicon Valley and beyond. For startup founders and investors, the question was: What did all of this mean, and how did we navigate the opportunities ahead?

Here are some of the key takeaways from their discussion:

* The secret to turning your technology into a product is evaluating business challenges and then choosing where to apply AI. Great startups address a problem worth solving.

* Right now, AI startups are beating #BigTech companies in very narrow situations because they are laser-focused on their target, and where they demonstrate the ability to deliver a solution to an identified problem (rather than being technology in search of a problem).

* There is a lot of experimentation happening in the broad AI space, and predicting what is going to work best is difficult. It is all so new and happening so fast. With very few exceptions, technologies in the market are not yet operating at the enterprise scale.

* For many early-stage generative AI companies, they are offering very bespoke solutions to customers that are not scalable or repeatable for other customers without significant customization. This will make it hard to get to $10 million of annual recurring revenue, a key benchmark for raising a Series B round.

* If your company is looking to incorporate more AI into your current offerings or get it on your roadmap, you will need internal talent that really understands the technology and how to operationalize it. Many existing businesses will need to pivot to incorporate AI while avoiding disruption to the core products and services that are selling.

This space is fully in the hype cycle, and we are only in the very early innings of the AI revolution. What will happen when investors realize that it will take years to get to scale up?

Find the video recording of the webinar here.

Discover more about Louis Lehot and explore additional professional insights on his website https://louislehot.com.

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