Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Phil Libin, co-founder and CEO of mmhmm and All Turtles and co-founder and former CEO of Evernote
Companies and investors that focus on the design of real-life use cases will be the big winners in AI. Breathtaking demos won’t matter as much as the ‘toothbrush test’: practical applications that make us better at what we’re doing and will be used multiple times a day.
Examples of AI assists that pass the toothbrush test are the email summaries made possible with Apple Intelligence, or the “Questions” and “Highlights” functionality in our video communications app, mmhmm, which asks a series of questions and then makes suggestions to identify weak spots in the presenter’s arguments, to help them bring out their best self and be great on video.
Both the downside and upside of AI will continue to be vastly exaggerated
The downside is commonly said as something like, “destroys humanity.” The upside as something like, “Cures cancer and solves climate change and poverty.” Neither of these things is going to happen on anything like the timelines relevant to investors.
The Wall Street Journal expects total spending on AI from just the four biggest tech companies to be $231B this year. Up 48% from last year. That puts it up there with some of the biggest investments in the history of mankind In today’s dollars, from public sources):
- Manhattan project: $30B
- Great Wall of China: $110B
- Apollo Program: $318B
- Entire US Defense Budget: $916B
It’s not quite the $5T the US put into COVID response, but investments like this will need some kind of return sooner or later.
Over the next five years, the realistic bear case is: big companies and investors just wasted a huge amount of cash on the fastest-depreciating-asset in history. We all get to swim around in AI-generated garbage on the internet for a while.
The realistic bull case is: some genuinely useful new tools emerge which create value similar to the web or mobile phones. To get closer to the bull case than the bear case, companies and investors should focus on the design of real-life AI use cases. Breathtaking demos don’t matter as much as the toothbrush test.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
‘AI realist’ Phil Libin appeared on CNBC Closing Bell: Overtime recently urging tempering AI expectations and focusing on development of use cases that pass the ‘Toothbrush Test’. Libin is co-founder and CEO of video communications app mmhmm and AI startup studio All Turtles. You may remember him as co-founder and former CEO of note taking and task management app Evernote.
Phil Libin, co-founder and CEO of mmhmm and All Turtles and co-founder and former CEO of Evernote
Phil Libin is co-founder and CEO of mmhmm and All Turtles. mmhmm is the hybrid video app built to enhance your presence and presentation, improving communication for the way we work now. mmhmm was built in 2020 to make meetings more engaging and spark better conversations. All Turtles is a globally distributed product studio.
Prior to mmhmm and All Turtles, Phil was a Managing Director and Senior Advisor at General Catalyst, a leading venture capital firm. Previously, Phil was the co-founder and CEO of Evernote, growing the product to hundreds of millions of users. In November 2022, Evernote was acquired by Milan-based Bending Spoons.
Phil also co-founded and served as CEO of CoreStreet, which was acquired by ActivIdentity (now owned by HID Global) in 2009. Earlier, Phil was co-founder and CEO of Engine 5, a leading Boston-based Internet software development company acquired by Vignette Corporation (VIGN) in 2000, where he went on to serve as principal architect and chief technologist for applications. Phil holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Boston University, where he is currently on the Board of Overseers.
