Few&Far reposted this
AI Product Management and Technologist ✦ Chief Product Officer at Faculty.ai ✦ (ex-AWS)
What is your strategy for the AI hype cycle? It is quite simple really. Lean into the Hype, and deliver pragmatically durable value. I was at a great round-table this week hosted by Few&Far at Creandum's offices. Attended by a great group of Product Leaders. At one point we discussed strategies for the AI Hype cycle. This is a topic that has come up across the events and talks that I have given over the last year. And a basic perspective has emerged for me. Lean into the hype. Innovation is often driven by a vision of the future. Hype has brought attention and investment. If you are a farmer and the weather brings you good rain and sunshine, use it to the best of your ability. Just don't expect it to last. Deliver pragmatic durable value. Don't lean so far into the hype that you fall over when the music stops. Every dollar you spend on innovation should be targeted and purposeful. Even experimentation can meet these criteria. So let's apply this strategy to a few specific examples. These are all my personal opinions and I reserve the right to be wrong in your particular domain, industry, company or market. 🙂 Do I invest in AI for my product? Yes, you should be investing in AI. Not because of the hype, but because every product benefits from data science and some form of AI. This advice mostly extends to Generative AI as well, with a serious caveat; Generative AI has several amazing use cases, but they are probably not the ones you hear the most about in the news. How do I invest? Remember what differentiates your product in the market, and invest there to further extend that differentiation. A lot of the "low-hanging fruit" AI we see today will be commoditised by the big tech players, funded by billions in investment. Do you market your product as AI? Marketing is determined by customer demand. And right now customers are demanding AI. Be thoughtful about how you present your product and its AI capabilities. Don't wholesale rebrand. There will be a backlash and marketing will be the first to suffer. How do I manage my boss, or his/her boss, who is demanding more AI now? Embrace their enthusiasm, ask them for the budget to go with their demand, and convince them of your plan to deliver pragmatically durable value. Educating ourselves, and then our stakeholders, is always the first step. What about the backlash that is coming? Not all hype cycles are made equal. In 2007, the first iPhone, still true. Where as VR (Occulus-2012, Magic-Leap-2016, "Meta"-2021), not so much. The impression that the general public got from GenerativeAI-2023 ( magic box that can reason like a human and communicate like a human ) is only about 20% true. Unlike VR however, that 20% is genuinely applicable across all products and companies. So expect this bubble to fall somewhere in between the extremes. If you deliver pragmatically durable value, changing the marketing won't matter as much to the customers you brought value during the hype.