After the Pandemic

While things have largely gotten back to "normal", the notion of the "new normal" is finally settling in. And things have changed a lot.

The Events Space

One example is in the events space. And one of those events is the RSA conference, which is, if not the largest, certainly the most widely recognized global conference for cybersecurity companies. Before and after the Pandemic, about 30,000 people in the cybersecurity field who are not normally there, were and will be present in San Francisco. In the week of May 5th, I will be there for at least a day, and I will be wearing a mask on the show floor.

Not because of COVID. I will be wearing a mask there as well as on planes because I am tired of getting a little bit of every disease from all over the world. With people there from more than 100 countries, after having flown in from everywhere, conventions and meetings of this size just about guarantee illness, and I have been going to this event for decades. I have just decided to no longer get sick in the following week. And the same is true everywhere.

But another I think larger effect on the events space that I suspect will last a while is that physical presence is just no longer as necessary as it once was. People are used to not meeting in person. But they are also getting burned out from too much online and not enough in person interaction. So in the events space, people will not pay as much to attend and many won't pay at all. Which drives the entire space into the arena of pay-to-play.

When conferences go toward pay-to-play - which all of course have always been in one way or the other - or they don't survive - they also go from disinterested expertise as presentations toward pure commercial interests - which is to say sales. That's good for sales - bad for information value.

The AI Space

Once people started to go online instead of in-person, another side effect is that the personal touch so to speak became less important. All that social skill at in person interaction went away and instead the ability to entertain and communicate in virtual spaces took over.

AI, of course, seemed like an amazing breakthrough at the end of the Pandemic, but in fact, the same AI was there before for quite some time. It was just not as effective because it could not replace in person as well. But once content and interaction was limited in bandwidth, the AI capability rapidly caught up with much of the bandwidth available at reasonably realistic speed. Which is to say, the differential was not worth the difference.

If I cannot shake hands or have an intimate look in the face, why do I need the other stuff? In fact, how can you really tell if I am writing a personal email or a generated one. Sure - the constant contacts of the world still send out their stuff in a structure that is obvious to see, and folks read it as such. But those individual emails you get not through a mailing list, are they actually AI? Or AI enhanced?

Common claims now asserts that 50% of all content on the Internet is automatically generated. By the way - mine is not. I actually sit here and type it out, and if/as I use voice to text, it gets a lot of it wrong so I have to correct it. So after the Pandemic, and I argue in no small part because of it, AI is acceptable for many to human communications. In fact, we are all anxiously awaiting AI for answering AI, which will then get to the point of no reason for us to even go to work.

Marketing and Sales

With the change in personal presence came the obvious and vast change in sales and marketing. In person meetings have always been central to showing customers how much you care and how much you want their business. It's both a competitive advantage and path to a true personal business relationship.

I have never been all that good with the idea of spending enormous amounts of time and energy to generate and retain clients, and as such, I don't have as many long-term clients as I might. I have spent many hours interacting with people online throughout my career, and the movement to live online remote with video is a great boon to my business. I also don't live near many of my clients, who are global in nature, and extremely diverse. For those of us who don't live in big cities, the Pandemic has helped us equalize the difference of physical proximity.

But on the other side, the use of AI has displaced many in sales and marketing, and the reduction in conferences and similar meetings has driven sales and marketing into the online world. This depersonalizes a lot of things and, perhaps more importantly, drives out the major differentiators that use to help tell the difference between real experts and claimants to the same. Frauds have become more common and less apparent, and the ability of anyone to sound like an expert has driven the trust challenges to new heights. You can no longer depend on those who are in front of the group at your local event to be actual local experts as the vetting process has become less capable.

Rip-offs have also become more common for lesser amounts of money each because of the economies of scale in the electronic realm. When higher volumes or electronic replacements for physical presence came along, the fruadsters rapidly applied their existing technology to take advantage and thus they can steal more by stealing less at a time over longer time frames from more people. And of course this means less trust in real sales people doing the real job of helping customers to find real solutions to meet their real challenges.

All of which brings us to...

Dis/information

If you look at the combination of the change from evolutionary physical presence for communications to online everything, combine it with the drive to AI in generating higher quality real-time generation and the acceptance of content from non-human actors for influences such as sales and marketing, the through line points to more effective information and disinformation delivery at lower cost to more people and their automated systems.

Lacking all the traditional human differentiators and substituting artifices seems to imply an increase in risks (uncertainties) associated with all content. But the lack of recognition of these issues by most in top management has led to a misunderstanding of the value of AI in the emerging post-pandemic world.

The startup world seems to be more heavily affected than other areas. This cuts in both positive and negative directions. On the positive side, AI-related startups are now all the rage - or at least they were for a short time. Most of the ones getting funding are huge by comparison to the early stage companies who are just starting out. This is in no small part because of the vast resources required for the underlying technology. The so-called large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly built out while the small language models (SLMs) that aren't all that small are starting to emerge for special focused functions. Add to that hardware implementations and the market is seeming to settle down even before it fully emerges.

At the same time, very low cost of entry guarantees an ability to innovate for the end user, but this also means ongoing fees for the startup supporting their customers and a lack of certainty about pricing and availability going forward. Dependencies on emerging technologies both remaining available and operating in the same manner in an immature market is fraught with uncertainty, which translates into risk for the investor.

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In summary

It's getting wild out there, and the post-pandemic signals a change to abnormal and not a return to normal.