Every time I turn around, there’s another AI tool. Especially generative (gen) AI. Seems like there’s an app for everything – especially with AI.
But you don’t necessarily have to get the latest app in order to do some very powerful things. You certainly don’t need to chase after the “latest and greatest”.
Why: There are some excellent reasons.
Number one, it’s additional cost. Even something that you get for $10 a month…. well, that adds up. You can easily rack up hundreds of dollars a month buying all these new AI tools.
I get it. People want to monetize, they want to innovate, and there are things that you can do in an app for people that they can’t necessarily do themselves. But it gets expensive.
But the other expense that comes in is your time and your attention, is that you have to learn new functions, you have to learn new features, you have to learn how to work the thing. It’s an additional learning curve for the app itself.
And then on top of it, if what’s behind the scenes (like ChatGPT) gets updated, is the app going to keep pace with that? I used to be the mobile channel lead for a very large high tech company. And I was also involved in mobile development prior to that. I was in charge of “mobilification” of a leading retail website as well. And let me tell you, keeping up with app development after you’ve built the thing, that’s where you come into the challenges. Pretty much anybody these days can spin up an app, but it’s the maintenance of it, it’s keeping it current.
It can be very expensive… very costly in terms of time, money, attention, all of what it takes to keep an app going. And not everybody does keeps up. So what do we have? We have app stores filled with old apps that are no longer valid.
And that’s not to say that that’s necessarily going to happen with all these AI apps, although a number of them probably will. The point is, every time something changes on the back end, they have to change the front end. So there’s necessarily going to be a lag.
The point is, you can get just as much functionality – maybe more – from ChatGPT (or the other models) by themselves. Sometimes you don’t need another “app for that”.