In 2022 and 2023 we have been witness to a meteoric rise in the world of artificial intelligence.

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The increasing sophistication and accessibility of AI solutions is making it easier for SMB’s to reap the benefits of this technology, which has previously been reserved for larger technology-centric behemoths, who have unlimited access to engineering and compute resources.

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It’s in this shift that the team of technologists and engineers behind X21 came together in early 2023. To not just take part in the most significant technological advancement we’ve witnessed, but to be a key part of its evolution.
We do this through providing the infrastructure, technology, and growing suite of applications that give companies the ability to create and leverage fundamentally useful AI capabilities inside their enterprise. 

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We’re harnessing a business model that enables our business and offerings to expand and evolve with the market. As the market expands and grows, we expand and grow our capabilities - while remaining focused on easily enabling organizations to adopt, own and deploy their own secure environment that serves as the "sandbox" to develop and manage a one or many applications they utilize in conjunction with their enterprise stack.

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We believe that, if harnessed correctly, AI is poised to unleash significant leverage in productivity and new capabilities in the enterprise, all tied back to value creation and net margin improvements. 

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In this, organizations and executives are faced an opportunity and responsibility to understand this technology, specifically in how it relates to their business and industry.

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There are many things to take into consideration when doing so, and X21 exists to help companies expedite the learning curve and evaluation - moving more quickly from analysis to utilization.

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Industry Evolution

In early 2023, the “breakout year” for AI, the public-facing version of OpenAI's ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months. 

This significant catalyst event that provided out-of-the-box accessibility to the general public, sparked a wave of awareness, interest, innovation, funding, and adoption in the market. 
A number of other foundational models launched similar offerings, with an eye on OpenAI's pole position. Big tech like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon entered into DEFCON mode, focusing on their primary AI developments, strategy, investments and strategic partnerships.

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This wave of innovation increased in both its speed and its level of competitiveness. The biggest tech players are making moves and positioning to dominate, as a wave of capital flows to the innovators and startups that are pouring into the market.

With a significant concentration across the globe from the brightest engineering minds, and the seemingly endless supply of venture capital to fuel their efforts - a flywheel of compounding innovation is well underway.

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And while there are many leading industry players, big tech, and foundation models - there is no clear winner. We're seeing segmentation, refinement, and categories evolve as the industry marches on towards a future where AGI becomes reality.

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Organizations of all shapes and sizes started to utilize the technology, some quietly, some publicly announcing what they were doing.

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With an adoption curve in all new technologies, there's always an initial spike of interest, news, speculation and interest. First movers, hype, dismissers and winners.

This is followed by a more pragmatic retracement back to fundamentals - where key questions are answered with data relating to its value, through use cases and evidence that is material to serve as the foundation for further growth and a more informed phase of adoption. 

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We believe this is where we are at today.

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The main certainty: there will be rapid and continued innovation, evolution and change in this industry - at breakneck pace.
Capabilities will expand, solutions will improve, opportunities will increase.

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We’re still in the early days, but the usage of AI is already widespread

It’s no secret that many companies are already active in the evaluation and usage of AI in their business, in a number of use cases.

For some more additional perspective on some of the economic potential of AI, in terms of productivity in the workforce, this Mckinsey article outlines some of their findings.

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Some outstanding data points:

• AI has flipped from academia-led to industry led, by a large margin
• models are only as good as the data they have access to - making data integration and containment paramount
• experimentation with tools is already relatively common in a large percentage of organizations globally
• there is widespread belief from respondents that they expect these new capabilities to transform the industries they operate in
• 79% say they have exposure to it in some capacity, 22% saying they are regularly using it in their own work
• ⅓ (60%) of organizations are already using AI in at least one function, with 40% state companies are looking to invest more into it
• expectations for AI’s impact are high: three-quarters of all respondents expect AI to cause significant or disruptive change in the nature of their industry’s competition in the next three years

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"Our latest research estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across the 63 use cases we analyzed—by comparison, the United Kingdom’s entire GDP in 2021 was $3.1 trillion. This would increase the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. This estimate would roughly double if we include the impact of embedding generative AI into software that is currently used for other tasks beyond those use cases." -Mckinsey

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The AI Value Chain

We focus on the top 3 elements of the value chain - bringing them directly into the enterprise environment to leverage foundation models and develop tailored applications and workflows.

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Where we go from here

While in the midst of one of the most significant technological shifts of all time - companies are faced with the imperative evaluating of the technology - specifically in terms of what it can do for them, how it can be applied to their business and each operational department, as well as how it will impact their industry at large, with a view of not only remaining competitive, but being able to innovate, outperform, and obtain a competitive advantage.

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Some starting points and scenarios to think through in getting started:

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--> Work backwards from challenges, inefficiencies, redundancies, problems and cost centres - to hone in on the most significant areas of need, opportunity and impact
--> Identify areas where your business can save money, save time, reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, and improve the experience for your customers
--> Allocate resources to research, evaluate and identify a scope of opportunities and their respective requirements
--> Establish a private and secure environment for testing - that serves as an internal innovation engine and corporate asset to learn, build and test from
--> Develop, test, deploy and refine solutions, augmenting capabilities and bringing new efficiencies to their organization - department by department, piece by piece

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Similar to other waves of technical innovation, there will be bottlenecks and fatigue around proof of concepts. There will be hurdles that challenge the deployment of pilots into realtime business workflows.
Challenges that, when addressed, lead to new capabilities, efficiencies, opportunities, savings and value creation.

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Adopting a culture of innovation inside your organization will support companies in establishing new and significant insights that only come from the development and testing of new technology applications.

Building from these learnings, and going from one success to the next, solution to solution - leading companies will build their competitive edge, and grow as an intelligence-augmented contender in their industry.

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Get Started

We believe that every company must have, and will have their own secure environment, enabling ongoing R&D, and suite of data-connected applications that are deeply ingrained into their products, systems and organizational workflows.
We're helping to augment capabilities, business by business, industry by industry.

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At X21 - we approach all our relationships like partnerships.
We aim to make the process of evaluation and implementation of AI as simple as possible - and drive towards a clear path of implementation and creates new assets that produce leverage and value inside of an organization.

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Whatever the desired objective is - what is key is to get under way and to start learning by doing.

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If this is something that your organization is interested in in evaluating and putting into action, please get in touch with us.

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--> Request access to our platform waitlist (below)

or

--> Use the form below to get in touch with us today.
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