Forerunner reposted this
Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly thought about the growing sense of bloat and superfluousness that’s weighing on the consumer. There’s deluge of options, information, purchasing research, and comparison inherent to nearly every dimension of our health, finances, personal interests, home lives, and so forth. Rather than empower us with optionality, this degree of access is bogging consumers down, leading to an acute sense of decision paralysis at seemingly every turn (new research shows that 74% of consumers abandon purchasing decisions simply because they feel overwhelmed by the volume of choice). This is without doubt a byproduct of the past decade+ of tech innovation focusing on access. “Democratizing access” has underpinned the thesis of the lion’s share of startups — and it has been an excellent place to build from. But access now feels counterproductive. More is no longer more, signaling that the prevailing value proposition of the tech industry is post peak. At Forerunner, we obsess over values shifts and technology shifts — and an intersection of the two is where things get really interesting. This shift away from access is significant, particularly because it dovetails with the current major technology shift: gen AI. Rather than wanting more options or the agency to do things alone for ourselves, consumers are now craving products and services than edit the vastness of what’s available to them and do things with them, or better yet, for them. Gen AI is uniquely suited to accelerate this value opportunity, and on a scale that we haven’t seen before. In our latest research efforts at Forerunner, we explore this shift from access to edit, and how that’s changing the way companies are built, where value is created, and what opportunities are poised to capture consumers’ hearts and minds in this new paradigm. https://lnkd.in/gUwrYfiE