The Big GenAI Time and Money Shift

The average consumer spends about 3 seconds when opening an app on their smartphone. Most open 10 different apps a day. Over the course of a year, the time people spend just opening apps, not engaging with them, adds up to nearly half a typical work day.

It takes about a half an hour, on average, to manage the ripple effects related to an unexpected event — a merchant dispute, a travel delay, a school closure, rescheduling a doctor’s appointment, a billing error, you name it. That’s over and above the time spent identifying the problem and any initial attempts at troubleshooting to resolve it. Assuming consumers have only one such issue a month, that’s about six hours every year, almost a full workday, dedicated to the hassle factor. Already in the last 30 days, I’ve had three such hassles.

Is a Little Lost Time Really a Big Deal?

It’s widely accepted that early detection of diseases — and cancer, in particular — saves lives. The earlier the diagnosis, the shorter the path to treatment and the higher the probability of being cured and living longer. Researchers say that for many cancers, the survival rate for someone whose disease was caught early is three times that of someone whose disease was not. Early detection doesn’t just add more years of life — it makes those years higher quality and more productive.

Benjamin Franklin famously said lost time is never found again. It’s why time is such a valuable currency. Time is universal and it is ubiquitous. And as Franklin pointed out, it’s also finite. Every consumer has a time budget.  Assuming a life span of 79 years, that amounts to 690,144 hours, measured by hours in a day (24), days in a week (7) and weeks in a year (52). It’s hard to unsee that now, isn’t it?

It’s why we all care so much about how we spend the time we have. It’s the mental framework everyone uses to decide whether to spend time doing something or pay to have someone else do that same thing instead. The time-value of money is as much a personal assessment of value as it is a business measure of investment efficiency.

For innovators and business leaders, time can be innovation’s headwind or tailwind. How much time it takes to change, to implement and commercialize a new idea, and whether the “new” alternative is different enough (and worth the money) to abandon the old is how consumer and business buyers decide when and if to take the leap.

GenAI as Time Shifter

One of GenAI’s biggest impacts on people and society is giving people different ways to spend the most precious currency they have: their time. In some cases, this means spending less time on things that a software assistant can do faster and better (and cheaper) at work or at home. That shifts more time to activities that people or their employers may consider higher value and more important.

In other cases, GenAI accelerates the time to new ideas and transformational breakthroughs. That shifts the benefits from time forward with the promise of better outcomes (more time or better use of time) for many people and businesses — and often at a lower cost.

The ability to save and shift time is a GenAI superpower and it is — or will be — accessible to everyone. In a GenAI powered world, we trade time machines for computers and LLMs. Using apps to make better use of our time will become second nature, an embedded part of our day-to-day.

Those breakthroughs will also shift how and with whom consumers and businesses spend their money. As Franklin also said, a penny saved is a penny earned. The intersection of GenAI and payments will change how billions of pennies are earned, saved and spent.

From Swiping to Talking

I did a lot of cooking over the holidays, and that meant I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Like many of you when cooking, the television was on the background to keep me company.

I kept noticing an ad with people talking into their phones. It was obvious they were having a conversation with someone. The conversations were like those that one could imagine having with a friend or family member. At first, it wasn’t obvious whose brand the commercial was promoting or who the person was on the other end. I assumed it was an ad selling a new handset model.

Turns out the “person” at the other end was Gemini. The commercial wasn’t about a particular brand of handset at all, but an app that consumers could download and use on any phone.

The conversations the ad featured were about navigating the consumer’s day-to-day life, not asking for help writing the next great email to a prospective client or a voice command to change the TV channel to the Food Network.  It’s the version of a virtual assistant that consumers say they want — the one that can manage the hassle-factor scenarios that take so much of their time and mental energy. Or get practical advice on questions or decisions that come up.

According to a PYMNTS Intelligence study, roughly a quarter of U.S. consumers would be willing to pay $10/month to have access to a virtual assistant that could do that. And, that relegates handsets to being an access device to a smarter app ecosystem that users value. It’s those apps that will monetize relationships with their users. They will help them save time. Virtual assistants are examples of one such app. So are the others that consumers use that will only get smarter and easier to use as GenAI becomes an embedded part of those app experiences. And as voice becomes the access method that consumers use to engage with them.

It’s those apps that will monetize relationships with their users. They will help them save time. And that will challenge how handset manufacturers make money, and how app stores monetize GenAI.

When AI’s in the App

This must come as a real bummer to Team Cupertino. The launch of the latest Apple handset with Apple Intelligence last year was a strategy to pull forward the upgrade cycle and get consumers hooked on a smarter Apple experience that they would monetize through app subscriptions. That didn’t seem to go as planned. New research from analysts that track handset sales — remember Apple doesn’t release those data anymore — suggests that Apple Intelligence has not moved the needle on what they describe as “sluggish” iPhone sales.

For the first time ever, they said, last week Moffett Nathanson initiated a sell on Apple. Among the reasons: its lackluster performance in China and disappointing outlook with GenAI and Apple Intelligence.

The jury is out on whether the April release of a new and improved Siri integration will make Siri smarter, more useful and monetizable beyond the sale of the handset used to access her.

Data finds that virtual assistants that can cross operating systems are a headwind for Apple. According to an eMarketer study, more U.S. consumers are using Alexa and Gemini (176 million consumers) than Siri (90 million) which comes installed as part of iOS. Gemini became available on the Apple App Store in late November and was downloaded 7.1 million times in November on iPhones.

As GenAI becomes more integrated into third-party apps, Apple must decide how to monetize these features without alienating developers or facing further legal challenges. Its options are also a bit more limited, such as the tried and true 30% haircut on fees for digital apps.

At the same time, virtual assistants need to figure out their own models. Google with Gemini (in theory) can connect to commerce and search through shopping — and Alexa can connect to retail, healthcare, grocery and other products and services through the Amazon ecosystem. GenAI business models will adapt to where and how they can best distribute their apps without degrading the user experience — and without regard to the devices consumers are using to access those apps.

GenAI as the Antidote for Healthcare Pain and Payments

Imagine a world in which your doctor knows you’re getting sick before you do. Where healthcare isn’t an issue you panic about when something goes wrong, but a proactive partnership that keeps you healthy from the start.

GenAI has the potential to shift the conversation — and time and dollars spent — from how much it costs to make people well when they get sick to preventing illness before it even begins. That will make the future of healthcare about using GenAI to better understand and prevent disease. Interactions with the patient will become patient-first and smart-technology driven.

The economics are compelling. Right now, the U.S. is drowning in healthcare costs — $4.9 trillion in 2023, projected to hit $7.7 trillion by 2032.

Reports find that 28% of U.S. consumers skip, delay or stop medical care because they can’t afford it. That number is even higher for younger consumers. And although forty percent of consumers find their care costs manageable, they say they cannot afford to pay more. This same report finds that thirty percent say they struggle to pay for the care they need.

That’s not just expensive — it’s unsustainable.

By using intelligent monitoring devices and personalized health insights, it’s possible to dramatically reduce the cost of chronic disease management. Medication can be remotely prescribed, administrated and monitored as appropriate, staving off a full-blown, expensive and potentially physically debilitating medical crisis.

Each prevented chronic illness could represent saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in unneeded medical treatments.

GenAI has already, and will at scale, reduce the time and improve the accuracy of reading complex medical imaging scans, detecting subtle anomalies that might escape the human eye. It is set to revolutionize drug development, potentially saving pharmaceutical companies $400 million per drug and years of research time. It’s not just about cost-cutting; researchers believe that these AI systems could uncover new treatments they believe we’ve been overlooking.

As for clinical trials, some medical experts predict they might become a thing of the past. GenAI’s precision in matching treatments to patients’ molecular profiles could make traditional trial methods obsolete, accelerating the path from lab to patient.

We’re already seeing green shoots. Startup Recursion recently announced the completion of its NVIDIA-powered BioHive 2, which will help researchers access massive biological data sets and reduce the time required to develop treatments for various diseases, including rare conditions. At hospitals like Mass General Brigham here in Boston, GenAI is already screening patients and improving clinical trial efficiency. For doctors, the most immediate benefit is reclaiming time — automating paperwork so they can focus more on patient care.

Insurance companies will jump on the bandwagon, offering significant discounts to patients using these GenAI health monitoring systems, and employers who make them available to their employer population. There will be incentives for healthcare to be about being and staying healthy — where healthy is an outcome that is rewarded.

Investors are betting big on this vision, pouring a staggering $26 billion into making it a reality. This massive influx of capital underscores the immense potential and transformative power that many see in a future that fundamentally reimagines healthcare as a proactive, intelligent partnership between technology and human expertise. This technology can move us from a reactive model of treating illness to a predictive model of preventing disease before it even starts.

Saving time, saving money — even saving lives.

The GenAI Time Machine

GenAI isn’t just another tech trend; it’s a major shift in how people and businesses interact with technology. The apps people and businesses use are becoming smarter and more intuitive, pushing innovators and business leaders to rethink their strategies to stay relevant. Consumers are on board too, with more than half of them believing GenAI will enhance their healthcare outcomes. Most consumers say that GenAI at work is more helpful than harmful. And more consumers are building relationships with virtual assistants to reduce time spent on mundane tasks.

All of this points to a future where both consumers and businesses can make smarter choices about how they spend their time and money, leading to a more efficient economy. And a healthier financial outcomes for consumers. As Benjamin Franklin wisely noted, lost time is never found again.

Now, whether GenAI is the time machine we’ve been waiting for remains to be seen.

But when I asked OpenAI and Perplexity, what they thought, they both said yes.