Even if the technology is high performing, the technology will not pass the inflection point if there is little public attention and if companies won’t invest, resulting in few complements. Image: Shutterstock

In 2019, few people talked about messenger ribonucleic acid, or what is commonly known as mRNA. But by the fall of 2020, this acronym was all over the news because it enabled quick production of vaccines to fight Covid-19. Similarly, in the summer of 2022, few people knew what Generative AI (GenAI) meant. Yet the launch of ChatGPT in November made everyone aware of this technology’s immense opportunities.

What happened? Between the summer and fall of 2022, Gen AI passed an inflection point. High uncertainty about its performance gave way to increased confidence that the technology would affect businesses in a significant way. We illustrate this trade-off between uncertainty and confidence in a simple figure below.

If your company is working on a new technology that has yet to pass this inflection point, what must happen to get you there?

The evolution of new technologies follows an S-curve. In the beginning, there is a long incubation period during which technological development and use are confined to basic science. This period is characterised by high uncertainty about the technology’s performance and there is virtually no confidence in the emergence of concrete business use cases.

Eventually, there is an inflection point beyond which the performance and use cases of new technologies increase exponentially. At that time, uncertainty about their performance decreases rapidly while the confidence in their applications increases. At the end, the improvements in the technology’s performance decrease and eventually reach a plateau. By then, the technology would either have been well-leveraged or even used by competitors to supplant the incumbent.

Technologies such as mRNA or GenAI have passed that inflection point, whereas others, such as quantum computing, are not there yet. Three simultaneous factors are required to reach the inflection point:

[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge
http://knowledge.insead.edu, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2023]