Marketplace competition is reaching a new high with the era of artificial intelligence—deep machine learning capabilities offered to the entrepreneur as specialized services. AI tools as services spanning the marketplace are popping up at a rate that is seemingly increasing firms’ productivity and competitiveness.
However, what implications do offering AI and deep learning as a service have for market operations, buyers, and sellers? When AI services and custom stacks of them become widely used tools in the marketplace, will the entrepreneur’s competitive advantage be access to AI as a service for everything? What is AI as a service (AIaaS) for everything?
Just imagine systems such as AIaaS, DevOps shortening the development cycle, and ChatGPT creating content in the blink of an eye. All of these marketplace improvements will most likely amplify the institution of the market, significantly expand entrepreneurial opportunity, and lower barriers to entry in some markets.
AIaaS for everything is a concept that I see as improving the conditions of the marketplace in addition to the human’s energy through the division of labor, whereby the entrepreneurial class will be enabled by AI to be productive, creative, and much more effective in value creation for consumers.
In one of my classes, a student asked if AI service systems cognitively understand different types of market. Is it possible that AI services will socialize the marketplace, or in other words, undermine private ownership of the means of production? On the other hand, who owns the code and predictive output generated by the software programs; i.e., the ability to stack AI services in custom configurations?
To answer this question, we have to realize there has been a proliferation of small enterprises entering the AI fray obtaining and providing cloud-based services—or machine learning as a service—that will alter the human response to marketplace adjustments in ways we cannot deny are making markets more free.
What happens when AI becomes a customizable tool that everyone can access and becomes a standard feature of the marketplace? This is AIaaS for everything! The marketplace for entrepreneurship as we have known it historically will not in the future consist of insular small shops ; rather, AI will amplify markets, increasing the flow of capital between buyers and sellers, opening up exchange and the flow of knowledge and information. This will lead to new production technologies that will span the globe—basically enabling free markets.
Case in point, Howard Baetjer Jr., in his book Free Our Markets, mentions the importance of competition in a free market:
The essential requirements for meaningful competition are freedom of sellers to enter into a business, if they can find willing buyers, and freedom of buyers to take their business where they will. Consumers must have others to turn to and be free to turn to them in order for markets to punish businesses that offer shabby service or shoddy goods.
What is a free market economy? A free market economy is an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. What about privately owned AI service products’ impact on free markets? What is the difference between a free market economy and a market enabled by AIaaS for everything?
To me, it is all about entrepreneurs’ “spontaneous stacking” of AI systems services (AI infrastructure, development, and software services) to create custom bundles for their businesses and the effect that this customization will have on exchange and return on investment. Holding a global market share of 9 percent, IBM is currently the most significant AI user, not including AI startups, which expanded fourfold globally between 2015 and 2018.
There is a foreseeable race of big businesses and countries to be the AI superpower. Here we are talking about who is faster, stronger, and better than competitor in deploying AI software, development, and infrastructure services.
A 2019 article published by Deloitte agrees that the leading firms sharea level of FOMO regarding AI. However, how will the AI race and complementary technologies affect the entrepreneurial class?
As of today, I assume the AI capability gap is closing, but it won’t be by much until entrepreneurs can customize their approach to serving customers and creating jobs for others—different jobs than previously provided—via AIaaS for everything. AIaaS for everything can expand to general usage, which allows and encourages customizable work tools for the regular folks to participate in the marketplace.
Since we know that preferences reveal themselves in market transactions, what are the options for using AIaaS for everything? AIaaS can mean fully automated systems for management, manufacturing, storage, and payments, which would fixed capital requirements for these systems and increase capital generation between buyer and seller.
AI service stacking in a free market economy will not be based on dependent stacking but instead on spontaneous stacking (i.e., customizable to the entrepreneur), which is based on marketplace flows and adjustments, price changes, and customer requirements. In this free market environment, AI services will change capital from a fixed component into a fluid one.
If entrepreneurs have access to customizable AI stacking (i.e., spontaneous—independent—stacking) to funnel data and support inputs, notwithstanding the expert knowledge and the time required for setup and model conceptualization—also known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—their propensity to compete in a free market will increase. Any entrepreneur will be able to customize their data stacks (i.e., interface, frameworks, tools, infrastructure, and machine learning) without expertise in AI modeling. Spontaneous stacking, where one can stack AIaaS to resemble a latticework instead of sequential dependencies, will therefore expand the opportunities open to entrepreneurs.
AIaaS for everything sounds like a free market economics proposition. Contrary to the conventional cloud-based services, AIaaS for everything allows entrepreneurs to run all-inclusive operations full throttle solely on the power of machine-learning applications. A single person (or entrepreneur) using relying on AIaaS to increase sales and profitability fits the bill for is the solution to elimination barriers to entry.
This idea of service for everything changes the nature of supply and demand, competition, prices, and human productivity. Human instinct and the desire to help others in order to reach our goals are the only difference between AI and human energy. Once entrepreneurs have their own customizable AIaaS for everything, will a free market be possible? Indeed!