AI is not just a buzzword; it’s a powerful tool that is reshaping the future of business.
Automation in operations is an area where AI excels. Think of ‘macros’ in Microsoft Excel, which perform repetitive tasks with a single button press. AI can automate even more complex tasks, leading to significant efficiency gains.
AI-powered customer support available 24/7, where customers can’t distinguish between human and AI agents, can substantially save costs and improve customer experience. It can offer a strong competitive advantage by analyzing large data sets to gain deep insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to create highly responsive and innovative value propositions.
In sales, AI can predict customer preferences and enhance after-sales services, providing a better customer experience and another competitive edge.
These advancements create a sense of urgency for businesses to adopt AI and stay competitive. Many clients feel the need to understand and implement AI quickly to enhance their operations. The accessibility of AI tools, such as OpenAI’s API for GPT, has made this technology available to a wider audience, driving competitiveness and innovation.
Innovation process
In the webinar, Paris Thomas highlighted how AI can transform the innovation process which includes four phases: discovery, experimentation, acceleration, and full launch.
In the discovery phase, teams generate and refine ideas through methods like ideation and affinity mapping. They create initial prototypes, known as napkin sketches, and then develop business models and value propositions. This entire journey, from ideation to getting out of the building to test ideas, usually takes around five weeks and is an essential part of the innovation process as it involves a lot of iteration and learning. It's often a challenging process that requires determination and careful resource management to avoid wasting money.
With AI, this process can be dramatically accelerated. AI can aid in ideation, generating numerous ideas rapidly. While human input is still crucial for affinity mapping to ensure alignment, AI can speed up napkin sketching and business modeling. Custom GPTs and specialized prompts can help quickly create value propositions and customer profiles.
Using AI tools, the preparation time for customer testing can be cut down from five weeks to just five hours. AI co-pilots, specially designed tools, and custom GPTs can streamline the creation of necessary assets and facilitate quicker decision-making.
Compressing the innovation cycle
Paris showcased how AI can accelerate the innovation process, reducing the time required for ideation, prototyping, and testing. He started by discussing how AI can enhance ideation through trigger questions that stimulate creative thinking within specific innovation areas. For instance, AI can prompt teams to develop tools for older adults to manage stress, and provide visual examples like a guided meditation app for seniors.
To quickly prototype these ideas, Paris highlighted the use of rapid visuals such as customer value scenes and napkin sketches. These tools such as Rapid Visual AI can help teams illustrate the customer's pain points, current solutions, and the proposed new solution. Using AI to create these visuals allows teams to produce clear, engaging representations of their ideas in a fraction of the time it would traditionally take.
AI not only expedites the prototyping process but also enhances the generation of ideas during brainstorming sessions. Paris shared how the use of AI tools increased the number of ideas generated per person from around 20 to as many as 90, thanks to the detailed prompts and visual aids provided by AI.
Customer profiling with AI
One critical aspect of the innovation process is developing a solid customer profile, which you then co-create with your customers. Initially, you build a profile based on your assumptions about the customers' jobs, pains, and gains. The next step involves validating or invalidating these assumptions through direct conversations with the customers.
To speed up the creation of these customer profiles, Paris introduced an AI-powered prompt. This prompt can generate a list of 30 detailed jobs to be done, covering functional, social, and emotional aspects. AI can suggest jobs that you might not have considered, broadening your perspective. The same process applies to identifying customer pains and gains, allowing you to gather a comprehensive set of assumptions quickly. Once you have these profiles, you engage with customers to validate them.
Insights and pattern discovery
After gathering customer feedback, it's essential to analyze the insights and identify patterns. Paris highlighted how the Strategyzer Platform helps document interviews and automatically aggregates the data into a designated workspace. This feature allows teams to step back and view evolving patterns and insights, aiding in decision-making. The AI component of the Strategyzer Platform further enhances this process by interacting with the documented content in innovative ways, making the synthesis of information more efficient.
Sharing your story
The final stage in the discovery process is sharing your story. Paris demonstrated how AI can expedite creating pitch decks using tools like beautiful.ai. By inputting specific prompts, such as designing an eight-slide pitch deck with elements like a napkin sketch, business model canvas, customer profile, and customer interview feedback, the AI generates a structured presentation in real time. This approach is significantly faster than starting from a blank slide deck, enabling teams to present their findings compellingly and efficiently.
While AI is not a magic bullet, it dramatically accelerates various stages of the innovation process. And in some areas at this point in time, we still need to take the human brain and say, what's your role in this?
