I opened Succeedcast with the question I get asked most often, in one form or another: why does AI feel commercially urgent right now, and not two years ago or two years from now?
To answer it properly, I went back further than most AI conversations do, through four industrial revolutions. Mechanisation and the factory system. Steam and the railways, which built national markets. The electric motor, which let us redesign the operating model itself rather than just the machine. And then semiconductors, software and the internet, which is the revolution most of today’s leaders were trained inside.
The pattern that repeats
Every one of those shifts expanded the markets and economies and with the growing population and demand, we are faced with more decisions than humans can handle in enterprises and governments. I call this the judgment bottleneck, and it shows up in three dimensions every time: what to automate, what to keep human, and how fast to move once the answer is clear.
AI is the answer because it provides you instantaneous, relevant and tailored decision inputs, recommendations, predictions and insights, at a scale that humans cannot match. It upgrades your ability to make better decisions faster, and frees up your human time for actions and results.
What is different about AI is scale. This is the first of these revolutions to arrive globally, near-simultaneously, in every industry, and in every country and literally available to anyone who has a computer device and an internet connection. The leaders who succeed with be the one who understand how to leverage the success conditions already in place to transform their business.
Three things I’d do first
- Treat AI as a strategic asset, not a tactical tool. This is the mistake laggards made in all of the previous industrial revolutions. The leaders who succeeded were the ones who asked how can I totally transform my business leveraging this new technology?
- Achieve a competitive pricing power. Move upmarket and differentiate your products and services with AI, so that you can charge more and make more profit. Don’t just use AI to cut costs.
- Design a new operating model for an AI-driven transformation. Consolidate and organise all your growth functions around AI. If each function is trying to do its own AI thing, also the impact will be insignificant. AI changes internal and customer-serving operating model radically but both need to be assessed and redesigned simultaneously leveraging AI.
Lead. Speed. Succeed.