In case you missed it, the beginning of 2025 brought an exciting new development to the AI industry with the emergence of DeepSeek, a new AI model that claims to excel in reasoning tasks and is considered a potential competitor to leading models like OpenAI's GPT-4. To help you dig into what all the fuss is about, Seek AI has put together a quick overview of what you need to know about DeepSeek for business.
What is DeepSeek and why did it go viral?
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that offers a new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek R1, which recently went viral after eliciting industry wide surprise for both its ability to compete closely in performance with American big tech leaders like OpenAI, as well as do so at significantly lower cost. DeepSeek advertises R1’s API cost at $2.19 per million output tokens, compared to OpenAI's $60 per million token cost – a wide disparity in competitive pricing.
The company was recently accused of improperly using OpenAI’s model outputs to develop its technology; however, DeepSeek’s R1 was also announced to be hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, quickly becoming a significant new competitor in the AI industry.
With its lower price and new market availability, DeepSeek democratizes access to advanced AI capabilities for developers with minimal infrastructure investment. This shift in the market resulted in concern among the investment community backing AI leaders like Nvidia, whose stock consequently faced downward pressure amid the emergence of its low-cost rival.
What impact could DeepSeek have for business?
DeepSeek's open-source nature and efficiency could make advanced AI tools more accessible to smaller businesses and startups, potentially leveling the playing field in AI-driven industries. Like all AI developments, DeepSeek is poised to have a significant impact on business outcomes, especially in areas like marketing, customer insights, and product development. Here is a quick look at different areas of business that may be influenced by the availability of DeepSeek:
Hyper-Personalized Marketing - DeepSeek’s ability to pull data and generate personalized insights could help businesses create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns. Instead of relying on broad demographic data, companies could use insights from DeepSeek to understand a customer’s individual preferences, past behaviors, and even predictive future actions. This could result in more effective advertising and higher engagement rates.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - By using the data gathered from DeepSeek, businesses could refine their CRM strategies. Companies could offer tailored services, product recommendations, and personalized experiences, which could lead to stronger customer loyalty and retention. It could also provide insights into customer pain points, making it easier to address issues before they lead to churn.
Improved Product Development - With access to data-driven insights, businesses could spot emerging trends, unmet needs, or common customer complaints. This could guide the creation of new products or the improvement of existing ones. Businesses could get a clearer picture of what people want, sometimes before they even realize it themselves.
Real-Time Adaptation - If DeepSeek offers real-time insights into consumer behavior, businesses could quickly adjust their strategies, inventory, or messaging to meet current demand. This agility could be a game-changer in fast-moving industries like fashion, tech, or entertainment.
What impact could DeepSeek have for business security and privacy?
U.S. businesses that are slow to implement American AI technology like OpenAI may be reluctant to adopt tech from DeepSeek that resides out of the country for security reasons. Businesses using DeepSeek’s powerful data-gathering capabilities will need to be very careful about privacy issues. If not handled responsibly, it could raise ethical concerns, especially around data consent and security. If customers feel their data is being over-collected or misused, it could backfire, damaging a brand's reputation.
The combination of DeepSeek’s data-aggregation power with business security and privacy concerns presents a delicate balancing act. On one hand, it could improve security, fraud detection, and compliance efforts. However, on the other hand, without stringent safeguards, it could pose a new risk of significant privacy violations and expose businesses to new vulnerabilities.
Several companies and organizations have been in the news for blocking or restricting access to DeepSeek due to security concerns, including several U.S. government agencies, cyber security companies like Armis and Netskope, and the Italian government to name a few. These restrictions are primarily due to concerns about potential data leaks to the Chinese government and perceived weak privacy safeguards, as DeepSeek stores data on servers in China and operates under Chinese law.
How does DeepSeek impact AI for data analytics?
DeepSeek’s advancements in AI-driven data analytics could lead to more efficient, accurate, and accessible data analysis across various industries, potentially transforming how businesses and researchers extract insights from large and complex datasets. At the foundational level of data analysis, DeepSeek is highly effective in making sense of complex and unstructured data, transforming these datasets into meaningful and actionable insights.
That said, however, agentic AI for data analytics remains the missing layer of technology needed to execute faster and more efficient insights for business. This is why companies like Seek AI are committed to developing the data agents that companies need to quickly and accurately employ DeepSeek or other foundational AI technology to query their business data and generate meaningful insights, without having to hire a multi person data team. Delegating data work to agents will continue to be the north star that data teams increasingly follow in the years to come to maximize the efficiency of their enterprise data assets.
How is Seek AI related to DeepSeek?
Other than the similarities in company names, Seek AI and DeepSeek are both businesses operating in the AI industry but with different focuses. While DeepSeek deals with personal data and behavioral analysis, Seek AI focuses on making structured business data more accessible and usable for better business outcomes.
DeepSeek is focused on providing personalized insights by analyzing unstructured data such as consumer behaviors, preferences, and social media activity. Its primary goal is to uncover patterns and predict future actions, offering insights that can be used for tailored marketing, self-discovery, or understanding consumer behavior. It's geared towards individuals and businesses seeking personalized data-driven insights.
On the other hand, Seek AI is an agentic AI platform designed to help companies analyze structured data. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to allow non-technical users to query databases and generate actionable insights from business data without needing to know SQL or advanced analytics techniques. Seek AI is aimed at improving decision-making within businesses, enabling teams to easily access and understand their internal data to drive smarter strategies.
Seek AI is actively exploring ways to incorporate DeepSeek’s technology into its foundational layers for enterprises interested in the option of working with technology from both companies.
Want to learn more about Seek AI? Visit our product overview page.
