The TikTokization of Everything

SHEIN’s explosion is nothing short of remarkable: SHEIN has grown over 100% every year for eight straight years (!), and its latest private market valuation makes it worth more than Zara and H&M combined.

One major reason for this is the quality of SHEIN's recommendations. Just as Bytedance anticipates the content you’ll want to watch, SHEIN anticipates the clothes you’ll want to buy. SHEIN is to commerce what Bytedance is to content.

The major consumer applications of AI will lean heavily into sophisticated recommendations that anticipate your wants and desires before you even know them—in the same way that the TikTok For You Page has shown people that they’re gay before they themselves have even arrived at that realization.

Major categories—dating, real estate, job searches—may find themselves completely upended by better use of artificial intelligence. Why swipe endlessly on Tinder when AI can surface your perfect match?

But over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of clamoring for what comes next. Virtual reality? Augmented reality? Autonomous vehicles? Web3?

What we’re seeing is AI emerge from the infrastructure layer to the application layer—the parts of technology that everyday people interact with.

Over the past decade, two primary forces have powered technology: mobile and cloud.

Another example is SHEIN, who have done the same for commerce.

Perhaps no use of AI is more visible to more people than TikTok’s For You Page. They have pioneered using AI to create incredible recommendations.

Perhaps the most compelling—and the most likely—force to power tech in the 2020s is artificial intelligence. AI has improved dramatically within the past few years.