Dan Rosensweig has been around the tech industry long enough to recognise an important platform shift when he sees one. As chief operating officer of Yahoo, he held one of the top posts in the consumer internet when the iPhone launched the mobile computing revolution.
This week, Rosensweig found himself in the middle of another tech upheaval. Online education company Chegg, where he is the chief executive, had the distinction of becoming the first company to report a hit to its business from generative artificial intelligence, as some students turned to smart chatbots for answers rather than subscribe to its own services.
Pointing to experience from previous big tech shifts, the former Yahoo boss was quick to claim that incumbents such as Chegg stand to be big winners from transformative new technologies like this — provided they act quickly enough to co-opt them for their own use.