Gartner Hype Cycle vis-à-vis xAI Hypothesis Incarnation into an Intelligent Application

Gartner’s Slope of Enlightenment Shows How RPost Turns AI Hype into Hope.

Armand here, RPost’s armadillo product evangelist. Just building on my recent post regarding the Gartner “Hype Cycle” model for Artificial Intelligence (2024) overlaid on today’s Generative AI companies correlating to share price, I’d like to share my hypotheses on the smart move of X (aka Twitter) merging into xAI (Grok generative AI) resulting in a reported $80 billion entity.

First, what is the Gartner Hype Cycle? It is, in short, a model that provides a view of expectations (perceived value) and realization of expectations (real value) over the lifespan of a technology category.

Looking at the peak of Nvidia, a company indicative of today’s GenAI trend/hype, you can see that its share price maps to the peak of inflated expectations of the Gartner Hype Cycle relative to Generative AI.

Now, if we believe this correlation, we should anticipate that for pure Generative AI companies, there is going to be a downward slope of share price (expectation of current value) as the use case expectations dip into this trough of disillusionment.

How could there be disillusionment related to this incredible technology, GenAI?

Other than for some specific use cases, the entire enterprise business world is trying to find real high value use case applications for the technology. Listening to the crowd of enterprise CIOs at the recent Gartner CIO Leadership forums, where RPost was a key sponsor and speaker, we heard over and over how, at the enterprise CIO level, executive teams have been mandated to find high value use applications for Generative AI for cost savings/efficiencies. Yet, very few of the CIOs had implemented something beyond contact center or document building/research that would change their business operations materially.

It seems to be a great technology looking for the killer application in business. It’s going to take longer than expected for businesses to realize the value. The infrastructure companies are still investing ahead of the enterprise revenue so there is money being spent, but application revenue lags expectations. Hence, the trough of disillusionment in expected value today.

Now, let’s think about X and xAI merger, and another category on the Gartner Hype Cycle, “Intelligent Applications."

An intelligent application is FIRST an application that has been used for years, solving important needs with important use cases. An intelligent application is when AI is infused into the current, established application to power it up. 

Think RPost, with its email security, email proof, eSignatures, document rights management and controls services. These are excellent (in my humble armadillo opinion, and the opinion of tech analysts like Aragon Research and IDC) established, essential business applications. Now with RPost’s RAPTOR™ AI infused, these business applications are powered up with the most sophisticated, intelligent, agentic AI. Thus, RPost is not a pure Generative AI company (and therefore not in a value-downward trend into this trough of disillusionment) but an intelligent application (and therefore on the upward value trend of the slope of enlightenment).

Regarding xAI – a pure Generative AI company – if it were to be taken public on its own, it would need to deal with this trough of disillusionment sentiment, in terms of market value today. But, by merging an established application X into xAI (Generative AI Intelligence), you now have X as an intelligent application and the combination essentially leapfrogs this trough of disillusionment to this value upward trend - great for an IPO.

Considering this, we should expect more GenAI companies to merge their intelligence into existing established business applications, to jump to this trough of disillusionment (think, Microsoft Copilot, Palantir, etc.).

Bottom line – we at RPost are on a terrific upward slope in terms of value, and the value we can bring to clients everywhere with AI-powered cybersecurity and business productivity solutions.

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