AI Value Creators

Chapter 1. +AI to AI+: Generative AI and the “Netscape Moment”

The title of this chapter may have caught you a bit off guard—after all, Netscape came out in 1994, and we’re writing this book in 2025! In this chapter, we’ll tell you what we mean by equating generative AI (GenAI) to a “Netscape moment,” and then we’ll lightly touch on a wide range of topics, from how the technology works to things to keep in mind as you plan your GenAI journey.

Our publishers told us not to make the first chapter too long, but we’ve gone a different route. We figure that if we give you enough things to think about, give you enough value, and teach you the things that sit in our brains that we put to work every day with customers, you’ll want to learn more. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here—it’s like a Netflix pilot episode: it’s a little longer than the episodes that follow, but the remaining episodes shorten up and narrow the focus to the topic at hand. We also did this so you don’t have to read the book linearly. For example, we might touch on how there are over a million large language models (LLMs) out there, which makes us confident in telling you that one model (no matter how popular it is or how much press it gets) will not rule them all. Not by a long shot. You might have a lot of enterprise data that you want to drive into your AI but not share, and that might spur you to jump to Chapter 8 to learn about the LLM landscape and how to safely use your data with an AI model. Or perhaps ...