Business Development Is Not Going Anywhere with the Advent of AI
We are living in the hype of artificial intelligence with the arrival of generative AI. On any social media platform, you can hardly escape posts about AI. LinkedIn is almost solely focused on it now. The resignation dramas of OpenAI’s leaders were like the best of soap operas. Everyone who can, is adding AI elements to their products/services, or even including AI in their company names. Why? Because AI sells. Companies are rushing to hire AI experts, overshadowing many other activities. The main focus now is to get this hot potato, AI, for ourselves. Leaders have euro signs in their eyes, believing AI should boost productivity and also bring cost savings by eliminating the need for human labor in many tasks. Some are utilizing AI to create perhaps radical innovations by building their own language models for their specific contexts. However, the broader picture is often missed in AI discussions, with a very narrow lens being used to view the world. Some even imagine AI as a plug that’s inserted into a socket, and voila, AI flows from the wall doing everything for us.
What was the fundamental mission of companies again?
What does every company’s fundamental mission boil down to? Creating value. The ability to produce something for which the customer is willing to pay. Value creation is like bartering, where the customer gets products/services from the company that solve their problems and needs, and in exchange, the company receives money. The origin of money is always the customer. As a result of the value produced for the customer, owners also gain value, the company can pay salaries to employees, taxes to society, and so on.
Even if a company has the most advanced technological solutions, ultimately it is the customer who decides whether the product/service was worth the effort and money. With AI, we often proceed technology-first. We have a solution, but what was the problem we’re trying to solve? And whose problem are we trying to solve in a way that this mysterious someone would also be willing to pay for it? Currently, anyone can create GPT-assistants for various purposes. It’s fun to try all sorts of things, but if you want to monetize your solution, you need to consider who you are really creating value for.
Processes and business models can be refined and improved, eliminating manual, pointless tasks and waste. But this has been done even before the advent of generative AI. The improvement of processes and business models can also be done without technology. Humans tend to be the most challenging and illogical factor in the system. There is a lack of cooperation between different parties, a failure to understand the big picture and how one’s actions fit into it. The baton is dropped along the way, sometimes even lost. Companies constantly do a lot of things that have no significance in the big picture, but it’s the way things have always been done.
What happened to being different, what happened to differentiation? AI can help in producing things and thereby speeding up and improving work, but the current logic of generative AI is based on large datasets it has been trained on, from which it creates new, similar content. Similar. Wait, was the goal to be the same, offering the same as everyone else to all the same customers?
Many are excited to experiment and create images and text with AI. Most of the illustrations are immediately recognizable as AI-made. They’re beautiful, but all quite similar. I’m from Finland. AI can do texts in Finnish also, but the style is often very American, overly effusive, which doesn’t fit into Finnish culture at all. Does AI understand the cultural context? No.
Let’s ponder for a moment the three basic strategies defined by management professor Michael Porter, by which a company can achieve competitive advantage. These general strategies are cost leadership, differentiation, and focus. In differentiation, a company seeks to distinguish itself from competitors with a specific feature that increases the perceived value to the customer. Nowadays, just a product/service no longer works as a differentiator, as competitors can quickly copy them. Competition between companies is now a competition between customer experiences.
Hypothetically, if a company took AI-Ally as its only employee and let AI handle product development, marketing, sales, customer service, etc., what would result? Bulk? The same as everyone else? Where is the creativity? Where is the uniqueness? Or do we want to be odorless and tasteless, everything to everyone with everyone? Well, many already are, but let’s not dwell on that.
Does everything need to be done using AI?
AI should help solve problems that actually matter. Or rather, companies should always have focused on value-creating activities, but now it’s emphasized even more. What tasks currently cause the most friction both in internal operations and with customers? Internal reporting, for example, is currently time-consuming in many places, with data being manually collected from different places for PowerPoint presentations. Annually, a huge amount of time is spent on pointless manual work. AI is a great help in streamlining processes.
Customer experience could also be improved and personalized in many areas by using AI, and for instance, long phone menus in customer service could be replaced with genuinely functional, user-friendly solutions. Chatbots could also really add value and perform real tasks, not just always respond with, “Sorry, I can’t do this.” All of this is about identifying real problems and needs and creating a solution for the current situation. AI can also be used in these. These problems/needs are still relatively easy to identify. If we really want to create radical innovations using AI, it often means building our own language models in a technical sense. Finding and implementing something radical also requires business creativity.
AI uses statistical analysis and large data masses to, among other things, detect patterns in consumer behavior and market trends. However, humans are social animals and always susceptible to the social context. Our social environment affects our values, motives, and behavior. Humans are certainly not logical and do not behave logically. AI cannot deeply understand human behavior and social dynamics. Our behavior is complex and constantly changing, making it challenging to predict. Random events also happen in the world that cannot be anticipated. The consequences of such events can be far-reaching, sometimes even catastrophic.
Even if we have AI at our disposal, it does not mean we can forget everything else. Business still needs to be developed, customers still need to be engaged, value still needs to be created, etc. AI can be used as a tool in decision-making and improving and speeding up our own operations, but what exactly do we want to achieve with everything? And how do we do it?
Technology leads and humans follow
AI is seen too one-sidedly from a technology and economic perspective. The human and social aspects are completely forgotten in the discussions. The same happens with the environmental perspective. Is anyone talking about the large energy consumption required by AI systems’ operation and training? Not really, because no one wants to be a party pooper.
AI is developing at a tremendous pace. No one has a crystal ball to predict what the world will look like in, for example, 10 years. All kinds of future images and scenarios can be defined, from dystopia to perfect utopia and everything in between. It’s clear that many things will change. Instead of AI being the master and ruling humanity, it should be the servant, doing what humans want it to do. Humans just don’t always know what they want right now. Now is the opportunity to solve big societal problems using AI as a lever, instead of flooding the market with all sorts of quickly produced, pointless trash. AI offers tremendous opportunities, but its utilization requires a responsible approach.
Technology itself is not a solution to all problems; it must work together with humans and society for the common good. With the rapid development of AI, we must also face its effects on the workplace and society more broadly. AI can streamline processes, improve customer experience, help innovate, etc., but at the same time, it changes job descriptions and can even replace certain tasks. This requires us to be ready to retrain and adapt to new roles. Above all, change requires human thinking to evolve. It has not kept pace with technological development.
Do you need help understanding how AI can be utilized? What are the real problems and needs it can address, or how can it be used to create entirely new, radical innovations? Or perhaps you’re looking to improve collaboration between different stakeholders in the context of AI?
I can help conceptualize AI opportunities by bringing business creativity into the mix and acting as a bridge-builder across organizational boundaries. Get in touch, and let’s talk more. Reaching out doesn’t commit you to anything.
