Status
Report

Howdy Friends,

I wanted to spend this month’s Status Report sharing a bit about the thought process behind Cornerstone’s upcoming AI feature. For starters, this technology is a massive win for many industries, including website building. It’s pretty remarkable as I’m sure you’ve experienced. The promise of AI however is also part of its curse. Just because you can do anything doesn’t meant you should or that it’s even going to be practically useful.

This creates a rather unique opportunity and is why we are not just jumping into the low hanging AI basket. Code, copy, and image generation are great, but without the proper infrastructure around it, they can often become isolated ivory towers.

As a matter of fact, just today I saw a video claiming that you never need to pay for a website again. They then proceeded to talk about all the different paid tools you would need to never have to pay for a website again. Unfortunately you’re simply shifting the cost structure from one place to another while simultaneously introducing new dependencies that may or may not be beneficial or affordable or even sustainable over the long term.

In many ways, it reminds me of the early internet. Few could understand or even comprehend where the internet was going as many of the life changing technologies were years in the future. First, a massive bubble burst and then, almost a decade later, we started to see the fruits of the internet. And guess what it took? Practical applications. Actual products. It took things like the iPhone to see that you could move computing to a phone. It took websites to show people how to tap into the world’s audience.

This is the foundation to our AI development. Fundamentally, we believe that a tool like Cornerstone is uniquely suited to excel in the this age. In part because we are building an experience to support your use of AI in some very interesting ways, but also because we can provide the very deep and strong structure around which you can build the next great wave of websites, apps, and solutions for your business and clients.

We are also focused on making it affordable. Cost can be a major inhibitor or strong accelerator to any new technology, and we are mindful to how this enters into the equation. Development is happening alongside other Cornerstone features, and we have a small working group of customers and team members who will be assisting with initial training. I have more to share about our strategy, but I’d like to save that for when the feature is ready.

At the end of the day, we firmly believe that AI’s best benefit will be in augmenting and improving human creativity, not replacing it. We’re building a product that will help you do just that and excited to partner together in this new frontier.

All my best,
Kyle