From what I've read, people spent a long time looking for the 'killer application'. Google didn't know how to make money off its search engine. Social media didn't exist in any mass form. Internet access on phones, beyond email, didn't exist in any usable way.

Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar service (MSN?) was the way forward and didn't integrate the Internet into Windows 95. That was after Netscape's browser was released and (relative to the time, I'm sure) very popular.

The value was obvious almost immediately, but it was obscured by flashy get rich quick attempts. Google chose not to make money at first but that was a business decision, not a necessity: people were paying tons of money for ads and referrals years before they were founded.

That’s part of the difference with AI now: the internet immediately generated significant value almost instantly for relatively modest investments, so there were a ton of small and mid-sized companies who saw almost immediate profits from moving catalog sales or support online, switching software distribution from mailing diskettes to downloads, etc. and some people were able to cut into established markets where the existing companies were slow to change.

AI is different in two key ways: the first is the extremely high cost, which prevents a lot of the bottom-up growth we saw on the web, but the second is that it’s not a reliable technology like the web was so you can’t safely use it in the most valuable contexts. In the 90s, some people screwed up form validation badly but most people didn’t. Right now, companies would love to replace things like customer service or sales with chatbots but nobody on the market can make a system which is both safe and useful because things like prompt injection require theoretical breakdowns, not just attention to detail.