How generative AI will supercharge productivity

Imagine a journalist writing as succinctly as Michael Lewis and six times as fast.

Imagine a video editor extracting the best short clips from five hours of video content in just 15 minutes. 

Imagine software programmers using an AI assistant to write code in their company’s style to four times their output.

This is beginning to happen today. Enhanced productivity is now possible with generative tech, where artificial intelligences work alongside people, like having a team of four helping you out—but in seconds and for pennies.  

What would you do if you could clone yourself? That’s essentially what generative tech is doing. All of us should take advantage of it. 

While increasing someone’s productivity by 20% is called “progress,” increasing someone’s productivity tenfold—as generative tech can—is more of a revolution. Generative tech will transform most industries you can think of, including education, marketing, media, software coding, and design. Generative tech products you might have already heard of include ChatGPT for text and search, CodeT5 for software programming, and Midjourney for art.  

And within the next 12 months, this tech will be everywhere. We’re tracking more than 500 generative tech startups, and have met with more than 100 founding teams building in this space. And, of course, Big Tech is working on generative tech too. 

As we learn more about the generative tech ecosystem, here’s what to expect in the coming months.

A boom in user-friendly applications

I say “generative tech,” not generative AI, because the AI is just one piece of the puzzle—the bottom layer of the tech stack. Really, the application layer on top is where we’ll see the human-AI collaboration. These are the workflow tools that lead to supercharged output, and there will be tens of thousands of these applications built in the next two years across every industry. In our portfolio alone, we’ve already made investments in AI-driven tools for industries like legal (Darrow, TermScout) and coding (The.com). And there are potentially endless possibilities.

A consumer tech resurgence

We’ll see a consumer tech resurgence over the next decade with a wave of new decacorn companies born from generative tech applications. B2B companies have stolen a lot of the spotlight and returns over the past decade, but the shift to generative tech will start to swing the pendulum back. Part of the reason this space is so interesting is because it stands to benefit individuals in a way we haven’t seen since the dawn of the smartphone. The online buzz generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Descript’s video editing tool and others like it, shows just how much consumers can benefit from the generative tech revolution. 

A turn to curation over creation

With generative tech, we will finally have tools that will take us from zero to one, making creation easier than ever. As a result, as we lean on the AI for creation, I expect to see more—of everything. More text. More video. More audio. More imagery. Then, the way users edit, tweak, curate, and master these tools will become increasingly important. The unique eye of the artist will still be valuable. Writers can still edit and refine the AI’s draft copy into their individual voice. They’ll just be better, faster, and more efficient at their jobs, leaving more room for curation.

Of course, this is a revolution, and revolutions are destabilizing. Many will worry that AI might take their jobs, shift their identities, and alter their social status. Skilled workers have spent years learning to do what ChatGPT, CodeT5, and Midjourney can do in a few seconds, so apprehension is natural when new technology shows up. 

I’ve been in the tech ecosystem since the 1990s, and I’ve seen multiple waves of fear arise during frenzies of newness. I call this the “life cycle of uncomfortable tech.” First, people treat the new tech as a silly toy and make fun of it. Second, people decry it. Third, they fear it. And ultimately, they join in and embrace it. It just takes time. 

The uncomfortable news about generative tech? It’s going to change the nature of work and creation. The good news? It won’t eliminate many jobs; it will simply evolve them. Further, it will create new jobs and fields we haven’t thought of yet. Further still, the overall quality of the writing and design we see will improve in those places where in the past a business couldn’t afford great writers or designers. 

My sentiment here is simple: There’s no reason to fight generative tech. It’s already here and it’s happening. You can, however, get ahead of the curve and learn to use new technology to benefit you and enhance your work. 

Those who embrace generative tech will see remarkable increases in their productivity in the next 36 months. These people will be operating in nearly every industry: marketing, sales, writing, education, finance, law, investment banking, data science, art, video, game development, TV and film, book publishing, magazines, news, real estate, software programming, and recruiting. Unfortunately, there is no doubt that we will also see an increase in volume and sophistication of online spam and disinformation. This is something companies and users will have to work together to combat.

We will achieve these productivity explosions by having generative tech software, which makes our access to underlying AI models easy to use and easy to integrate into our workflows. We will need software that lets us collaborate with other people in our work lives, much as we use Slack, Salesforce, or HubSpot today with our teams.

It’s going to be an exciting three years.

James Currier is a general partner at NFX, and was an angel investor in DoorDash, Lyft, Poshmark, and Patreon.