Olivia breaks down AI's impact on marketplaces across a spectrum. Physical-goods marketplaces like DoorDash are safest because AI can't move objects, but digital ones like Canva face real threats when AI generates designs for free. Most will land in the middle, using AI for search, personalization, and seller tasks like writing descriptions or building travel itineraries.
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And of course, the big— I think I, at SF Tech Week, I think I spoke at 5 different events about AI. I think you attended and spoke at quite a few also. Yes, I did. So yeah, I mean, there were many. It's obviously the topic du jour, so we need to have the topic du jour add-on to the panel. Talk about, Olivia, I know you've been thinking a lot about this recently, which is Marketplace companies are so much about using software to connect often humans with other humans. And obviously, now you throw in this whole generative AI thing where maybe, are humans going to get replaced? Is it going to be like what kinds of work? What is going to happen to this marketplace sector because of AI? And what's your thesis there?
I think it's a spectrum. And it's funny because many of the marketplace businesses that were previously hardest to scale, like anything that touches real assets and is moving items from point A to point B, are now the safest almost from everything that's happening in AI. Because ChatGPT can't drive something from one place—
Yet. Yet.
We'll see. I do think we're seeing many of the in-real-life marketplace businesses are able to use AI to make their logistics or operations a little easier. So we have a food delivery business, and now they can use ChatGPT to write more interesting or creative kind of descriptions for some of the items that are coming on board every week. Or, you know, they can use it to make the backgrounds of their images a lot more compelling to the consumers. And then maybe the far other end of the spectrum is like these marketplaces that are either digital assets or digital services. I would say Canva is like one example. Which a lot of people don't think of Canva, it's a design platform, as a marketplace, but they have historically had a whole cohort of human designers that are making these special templates and assets that then customers can come on and kind of buy and use to make their flyers. And Canva now has this interesting, almost existential question of like, we have data on all these designs and like we could just generate them for free by ourselves using AI. Like, do people care that it was human-generated? Like, are people just going to want the cheapest AI-only option? My take, I think many marketplaces are going to fall somewhere in the middle where maybe AI makes search on their platform easier. Like, I would love to be able to talk to DoorDash and just tell it how I'm feeling that day and what I want to eat and have it, you know, bring up an option versus like 200 choices every time. Or like on the supply side, lots of travel agent marketplaces. Imagine if all those agents can make the itineraries 10 times faster using generative AI on kind of the modules. So I don't think that AI is going to replace marketplaces at all, but hopefully will make the experience better for both sides.
And I mean, the travel one's kind of an interesting, that's an interesting case, right? You could argue both ways, right? You could argue that this technology is going to augment the travel agents, and it's going to make them that much more productive. You might also argue that it's going to replace the agents entirely. And so do you have a sense for what is the more exciting opportunity?
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think there are differences of where you play in the market. So just to take travel as an example, there's a lot of luxury travel marketplaces that are geared towards people booking $20K, $30K, $40K trips for maybe themselves or their family. And in that case, I think AI has a role to play in helping to generate recommendations and scrape data. But kind of the custom touch, the customer service, the having someone to call at any hour of the day when something goes wrong or when they need a different option for something ends up being really important. Whereas the other end of the travel marketplace is like maybe you're just only willing to pay $5 and you're looking for a somewhat custom recommendation for like 2 days in Paris or something, maybe in that case AI ends up replacing the agents a little bit faster than it does in other cases. We're already seeing some marketplaces offer almost a hybrid option where like the legacy product still exists, but if you want to go for like the light version that they clearly mark as kind of AI-generated, it's a like a lower price option as well. But I think we'll see a lot of evolution there in the next year or so. It's pretty early to call.
Well, it's so amazing because, I mean, obviously, the whole industry has gotten excited. And it's been like 6 months or something. And so everyone's already like, oh my God, we need to regulate this, or it's going to destroy everything, or it's going to be amazing. And literally, it's 6 months. It's like, calm down. We need to actually launch some companies first on this.
