This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.

6 October 2023. The start of our new leadership team’s 6-month term. And I’m back doing stand-alone slides and pitches having completed my bad logos/Another Lens series last week.

And it is election season here in New Zealand, so I opted to throw in something political (and funny!). Law and order is a big issue in this election, so this meme just seemed right. I have assumed the signboard is tongue-in-cheek, but you never know: Last month a bystander tackled a person who had shoplifted some items from an Auckland store, and held them until the police arrived. The good samaritan was told by the police to let the shoplifter go, and that his actions were illegal. This seemed to reinforce the opinions of some of the electorate that the current government is soft on crime. This image seemed on-topic.

My segue from the slide to my topic is that there can be many motivations for a business owner to want to change careers. Exit planning is not just about retirement. Sometimes it is about getting to the next big thing.

I have had a surprising number of conversations with IT business owners recently wanting to move into AI – the next big thing. They risk destroying significant value if they pivot their current firms from software/app development (for example) to AI. My advice to date has been to start something new, and exit/sell the existing business to fund the transition. AI is so new for almost all New Zealand businesses that working with clued-up entrepreneurs running a new business won’t be a major issue. This won’t be the case for very much longer.

I also advise these business owners to consider the Gartner Hype Cycle model. How much is AI like ChatGPT being hyped? Automation and Digital Transformation – a couple of recent ‘next big things’ – are yet to have their promised impact, languishing in the burst-bubble space known as ‘the trough of disillusionment.’ That’s where the Segway and Knowledge Management went to die. Is Generative, Large Language Model AI as a broad market transformation technology going to have the same fate? Will it be regulated to death? Personally I think this AI has legs. But then, I was one of the few that thought OS/2 would beat Windows.

The consideration for business owners is do I go all-in on a new technology, and abandon my current venture? Well, yes and no. That’s a much longer conversation, for another time.

Keen-eyed readers will also see that I have added my logo to the slide. I had included my logo on the slides over a year ago, but dropped it for the sake of simplicity and decluttering the slide. I think I have managed to make the use of the logo here less intrusive.