From iPhone to AI
Published on: January 9, 2025
Last update: January 9, 2025
How lessons from the mobile boom can help navigate the new era of software development
“We’re going to make some history together today.”
This bold prediction from Steve Jobs when he introduced the first iPhone in 2007 seems almost understated in hindsight. Within a week of the launch, Apple sold 1 million iPhones. Today, Apple’s phone is used daily by over a billion people. The smartphone has become arguably one of the most transformative technologies ever invented when you consider its vast impact across the planet.
The question now is: What can the mobile revolution teach us about AI’s transformative power?
The parallels between the mobile technology and AI eras are striking for those of us involved in enterprise technology and the surrounding startup ecosystem. Like the mobile boom, the AI revolution presents new opportunities for companies ready to innovate.
Riding high in the mobile boom
When I co-founded Modus Create 15 years ago, our firm rode the digital transformation wave sparked by the mobile computing explosion, growing from three employees to more than 400 across 65 countries. Today, we serve enterprise clients in diverse sectors like manufacturing, retail, life sciences, and healthcare, helping organizations become product companies where technology drives their core value.
The confluence of three key factors combined to create a fertile ground for companies like ours to take root and thrive:
1. A new era of mobile computing
The iPhone opened a vast app market, setting high design and user experience standards.
The App Store, now home to more than 1.8 million applications, allowed growing organizations to distribute and monetize their apps without traditional channels. The iPhone spawned its own economy, creating millions of jobs, and reinventing how work gets done in retail, banking, healthcare, and virtually every other industry.
2. Cross-platform development
With iOS and Android, open-source JavaScript frameworks like React Native and Ionic enabled quicker, cost-effective app development. Robust APIs allowed companies like Modus to leverage device features without starting from scratch.
3. Lean startup methodology
This approach encouraged rapid prototyping and testing, allowing companies to validate and refine ideas quickly with minimal viable products.
The AI era: A new ecosystem with new opportunities
The AI era's market potential is staggering. AI software spending is forecasted to grow to $297.9 billion by 2027.
As we saw in the mobile era, three factors are proving pivotal for companies in the AI space:
1. Advanced hardware
The emergence of advanced GPUs and specialized hardware for AI tasks has significantly reduced the time and cost of training models. As these advanced hardware components become more widespread, their costs have decreased. Startups and smaller enterprises can now afford powerful computing resources that were previously the province of large corporations.
2. Data-centric development
The focus is shifting from model-centric to data-centric development, with new frameworks emerging that prioritize data quality, essential for building robust AI solutions.
The combination of 5G and edge computing enables developers to create apps that leverage real-time data analytics to personalize customer experience or perform predictive maintenance. But, to make this possible, organizations must have a consistent process for gathering, disseminating, and interpreting data.
3. Condensed software development life cycles
AI automates many routine tasks, simplifying the development process for startups and enterprise IT departments alike. Many businesses are looking at how to use existing AI tools to increase productivity rather than build their own models.
For example, they’ll use AI pair programmers like GitHub Copilot, AI-workflow experts like Atlassian Intelligence, and roll out guidelines for using language models.
Just as in mobile computing, the AI era allows companies of all sizes to innovate more efficiently and bring solutions to market faster. To thrive in this new era, enterprise IT leaders should promote AI fluency across their organizations so employees understand AI’s potential and limitations. At the same time, it pays to keep an eye out for new players in the startup ecosystem who can advance your AI progress with niche capabilities.
Keys to success in the AI era
As a startup co-founder who works with many large enterprise clients, let me offer a few suggestions for seizing AI's enormous potential.
1. Look for specific problems where AI can deliver
In financial services, for example, firms are applying AI for fraud detection and risk management and seeing impressive results. Visa, the payments company, reports its use of GenAI to identify and predict fraudulent activity prevented $40 billion in fraud from October 2022 to September 2023, double the amount of the previous year.
In life sciences, companies like EVERSANA are using AI to speed up the MLR review process, saving time while enhancing the accuracy of the review process for team members.
The bottom line: Start with high-impact, measurable areas that can address business challenges.
2. Collaborate and partner
Many companies lack the in-house expertise to implement AI projects. That’s why it’s essential to find the right partners.
At Modus, our roots are in the open source world and we built our reputation and relationships early on by being active, visible, and relevant in the open source communities for JavaScript and other open technologies.
In the AI era, we’re putting similar energy into deepening our commercial partnerships with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and leading ISVs who have AI capabilities we can tap into to build robust, scalable, secure solutions for clients.
For enterprise IT leaders seeking to ramp up AI projects, don’t underestimate the power of a great partnership, and don’t overlook the niche skills found in the startup ecosystem.
3. Put AI front and center of your organization
AI presents an opportunity to bring fresh thinking to how you manage work across your operations. We’ve started to do this at Modus and will accelerate down this path in 2025.
For example, there are opportunities across our company to re-think how we can automate complex tasks, such as creating legal contracts. The cost savings generated from these productivity gains can be funneled back into hiring top talent to strengthen the business.
Prioritize what makes sense for your business. As I’ve said, any strategy for deploying technology should go hand-in-hand with a thoughtful approach to organizational design, and the most successful companies will structure work to cultivate innovation, enable their people to perform at their creative best, and be intentional about applying AI so it delivers tangible business outcomes.
The AI era allows companies of all sizes to innovate more efficiently and bring solutions to market faster. To thrive in this new era, enterprise IT leaders should promote AI fluency across their organizations so employees understand AI’s potential and limitations.
Just as the iPhone sparked a revolution over a decade ago, the AI era promises to disrupt every industry. GenAI is accelerating just as rapidly as smartphones did 15 years ago. Consider this: ChatGPT had a million users within five days of its late 2022 release. Two years later, it has 300 million weekly users!
AI is becoming part of our daily lives…and we’re just getting started.
For those business and tech leaders who can apply AI in bright new ways to deliver value, this is a golden opportunity to make some history of their own.
