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Which businesses can go “superfluid” first?
We’re all familiar with how mobile experiences transformed hospitality and transportation. Airbnb became the world’s largest hotel chain without owning any real estate; Uber, the world’s largest taxi fleet without owning any vehicles. With those mobile breakthroughs, a couple of fairly traditional industries went “fluid.” In both cases, companies digitized supply and demand in a previously physical marketplace, making inventory more transparent and easier to both provide and consume. By putting suppliers directly in touch with customers and creating better customer experiences, they decentralized and streamlined market transactions.
When these businesses entered their respective industries, they came much closer than incumbents to meeting market demand in real time. Now, with Web3, AI and other technologies removing even more constraints on connectivity — between companies and the employees, customers, vendors, business partners, and others in their ecosystems — fluid organizations like these are poised to go “superfluid,” further reducing friction not just in customer experience but in all aspects of operations.
We’re already seeing early signs in the automotive sector. For instance:
In automotive manufacturing, electric vehicles (EVs) dramatically lowered the frictions associated with starting a car company. With far fewer parts and easier assembly, and the ability to charge the vehicle anywhere (a new service to offer), dozens of new automakers have burst into the industry for the first time in a century. Many of them work like contract manufacturers in consumer electronics, using decentralized supply chains to create a complex product with little new investment. Even Foxconn — a manufacturer of iPhones — is making vehicles now. Conversely, well-capitalized incumbents can afford to vertically integrate — from battery manufacturing upstream to solar panels and in-home charging downstream — creating new sources of revenue, like grid storage sales. In response, energy utilities are moving into the automotive market with rental fleets and in-home grid batteries, and retailers and restaurants are adding charging stations to keep consumers inside while they wait for their cars to power up.
In the automotive product — the car itself — autonomy is perhaps the clearest harbinger of superfluidity. (The timing keeps getting pushed forward, but autonomous vehicles will arrive.) Without the need for a human driver to control the vehicle, car utilization could rise from 2-3% today to 10, 20 or 30% in the future — meaning we will have the same amount of transportation or more with far fewer vehicles. That will greatly reduce friction in owners’ lives, since time spent behind the wheel is time not spent doing other things. But it will also pose a threat to carmakers, who rely on low utilization to keep sales numbers high. Knock-on effects of this transition — think of the potential impact on parking garages, parking tickets, sidewalk deliveries — will move from imagination to market in a few short years.