We had the exact same problem before genAI became the next big thing. All the startups were selling generic fine tuning and labeling services both of which are super easy to build, and they didn't even work on our unique super high quality super high resolution 40TB dataset.
Our problem was we had a real world problem and real data. All the startups were solving for imaginary problems and had no data.
maybe that's really where the business here is.. working through a whole bunch of custom data-sets and trying to generalise from there. It'll be hard to generalise all of it, but I'm sure there'll be pockets of functionality that can be shared across more than a single data-set.
And maybe that's at the core of the issue here, namely that this service in its current form doesn't scale like b2c internet tech
Most startups want to sell you the equivalent of those airline kiosks where you tag your own luggage, because they are cheap to deploy and don't have high labor costs. The problems you describe are labor-intensive and not easy to solve automatically.
I think we will go back to tools combined with humans to solve at least some of them. So it's services and software.
Our problem was we had a real world problem and real data. All the startups were solving for imaginary problems and had no data.