AI: Think Bigger

AI is dramatically changing our world, of course, and it’s going to dramatically disrupt your business if it hasn’t already. Yet, most CEOs are thinking too small about AI. They’re looking back and comparing it to what they know, current product, current process, and saying it’s a new and better way to do what we do. Think of the horseless carriage or the first worldwide web that looked like a storefront. We call artificial intelligence that because we have a reference. It’s a new kind of intelligence or machine learning, a new kind of learning. And I understand you can’t do any better right now because we don’t know how it’s going to evolve and totally change things. What I encourage you to do though, is start thinking now that way. Start looking beyond the horseless carriage view of this capability and start planting seeds in your business for what you can become as this evolves.

And I’m going to give you three ideas to help you do that exploration. Because those that understand that the first to go beyond using AI as a substitute for what we’re doing today and more as an enabler to something totally new and beyond what we do today are the ones that are gonna thrive at the end.

Transformation:
Look for in your industry and in your business, look for ways to do what you do that are totally different than what you do. Yes, now is a good time for you to tactically use AI to quickly help you optimize and automate and improve your current offering and your current business. But the real win is gonna be when that capability allows you to leapfrog the way the industry is doing what they’re doing today. So look at ideas and, and be open and divergent and come up with possibilities for how what you do is no longer the same thing.

Disintermediation:
The other thing you can look for is ways for your industry, the, your place in, in the industry, what happens before you in the value chain, what happens after you, that steps of things that lead to the customer value. What if that was all one step? Disintermediation is one of the things that AI ultimately will be bringing to industries and markets. It’s gonna take things that used to take three players or five steps and make them one. You wanna be part of that. You don’t wanna be the one that gets removed from that group of providers. You need, you wanna be the one that consolidates. So start looking at what that disintermediation might look like in your industry.

Your Customer Knows:
And one of your best clues for where your industry will be someday is in your customer’s experience. They may not consciously know yet what it is that they want beyond what you’re providing today, but there’s gonna be clues. There’s gonna be friction. There’s gonna be irritation. There’s gonna be pain. There’s gonna be desires, unmet needs that are, uh, ways that the new you, with AI’s help, could provide for them in a whole new level.

B2B Clarity:
So it’s great that you’re using AI as a substitute today, but its ultimate value for your business is gonna be as a transformation agent. And it’s time to start now in picturing what that might be.