On Tuesday, ContractPodAI announced the launch of the Leah Marketplace. It’s essentially an app store that allows you to see examples of tools that people have built using the company’s AI-powered platform Leah.
I was so happy to see this, and it immediately made me think of JELL-O. Of course.
Let me explain.
Through my work in open-source technology and content, I’ve seen many people build platforms or create clean datasets that they release into the wild…and it then fizzles. No interest, no uptake, no one wanting to build with it.
Was there anything wrong with these tools or content? Not particularly. As most of these projects were “free,” there was some lack of brand awareness caused by no advertising budget to speak of, but even ones that have launched to great acclaim had a hard time getting used.
So, what do I think the problem was?
Let me tell you about JELL-O.
For those of you who did not grow up in 20th century America like I did, JELL-O is a type of flavored instant gelatin. You can eat it plain, but people seem to take great delight in finding new combinations of fruits and…other things…to place in it and creative shapes to form it into. Let me tell you that no special event in Felicity, Ohio, happened without a molded JELL-O concoction making an appearance.
(My favorite is strawberry or cherry JELL-O with fruit cocktail in it and shaped in a ring mold. Thank you for asking.)
JELL-O was not an easy sell initially.
Gelatin as a food base has been around hundreds of years, but it really took off in the Victorian era. The gelatin itself was hard to make and using it in dishes was very time-consuming. As a result, only the upper classes regularly consumed it.
That changed when the process for creating instant powdered gelatin was developed in the latter part of the 19th century. Soon instant fruit-flavored JELL-O hit the market and opened the world of gelled dishes to the mass market.
And everyone ignored it.
See, the problem was that while gelatin was an older and established type of food, no one that JELL-O was targeting as a customer knew what to do with it. It was a whole new category of food to add to their dining repertoire, so they didn’t really care that it was cheaper and faster. They had been living just fine without gelatin-based foods before JELL-O, and they would live just fine after.
Are you starting to see the parallels to large language models (LLMs)?
Instead of throwing in the towel or only marketing to the upper classes, the good folks at JELL-O realized that they needed show people all the ways that they could use JELL-O and fit it into their diets. Starting in 1904, they began sending free cookbooks out to show middle class homemakers how to cook with JELL-O and all the possibilities that were available to them.
And JELL-O took off!
People finally understood how to use JELL-O as a part of their regular diet and how it could be a building block for other culinary creations. Did we take that too far? Yes, yes we did, but the important thing is that people were trying.
And now back to legal tech and the Leah Marketplace.
Generative AI and LLMs are not just tools that automate an existing process or deliver a new source of information. They provide the opportunity to fundamentally change the way legal professionals do their jobs. They offer both the possibility of delegating tasks to a non-human assistant and also transforming tasks that were once extraordinarily time-consuming or labor-intensive into literally a few keyboard clicks of effort. Most humans don’t have the capability to contemplate the impossible.
There’s a lot of talk about “use cases” for GenAI tools, and specifically that vendors don’t always do the best job of articulating them. And I don’t disagree with that. I also don’t think that in their current state, LLMs or GenAI are flawless technologies.
But I do think that a major roadblock to widespread adoption of these tools is a failure of imagination on the part of end users. They need some guidance to see all the possibilities and how it can be implemented to complement existing needs. Once you get the basics of how to make a dish or use a tool, you can then start to experiment on your own and start to riff a little and create something more aligned to your needs.
I think this marketplace is a great cookbook to get people started on that path.
I just hope no one makes the legal tech version of Hot Dog JELL-O.
