February 2023: Is AI a feature or a business?

And are we solving problems or just building solutions for the sake of it? Find out more in the month's newsletter.
 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Pretotyping in action

Is AI a feature or a business?

Spotted in the wild:

The latest AI tools and solutions

Ben's Bites is a daily newsletter listing all the latest AI tools and solutions. It's great reading about the micro and macro problems people are trying to solve — some are real, and some fall under the “how can we force an AI story into this problem” umbrella. Experimentation is in full force here, but I wonder what good looks like for an AI product?

Here is a short list of new AI 'products' (or ‘Cool Tools’) from one of the latest newsletters — most will work, and most offer solutions that are way faster than the current approach.

Image Source

When you sign up for access to these products, most are lightweight pretotypes, in my opinion. It’s a smart way to test, but

…with the sheer volume of AI products and solutions, how do you cut through the noise? Just because ChatGPT and similar businesses can answer the question or solve the problem, does this mean there is a real business there?

The wrong question to ask is, “how many signups or paying customers do I need?”

What you should be asking is, “What Market Engagement Hypothesis needs to be true for me to build this solution into a business?"

What are the takeaways?

  • The explosion in ‘new solutions looking for problems’ is here — it's fertile ground to find and solve real problems in an exponential way.

  • Pick the right problem to solve and understand if it's a feature or a business.

  • Run experiments only if you'll take action on the results — otherwise just go ahead, take a guess, and build and hope they'll come (spoiler: they won't — 99% of ideas fail!).

In the field

I'm using AI with ChatGPT daily to speed up my work, streamlining multiple tasks like:

  • Summarising proposals into statements of work

  • Extracting key issues from master service agreements

  • Thinking through how we get Rapidly in front of as many people as possible to help them pretotype fast

  • Generating pretotyping ideas and content

  • Crafting better emails than I'm capable of writing

You must use this technology now in its infancy to understand how this is going to impact your work. Treat it as an augment to your existing capability, in the same category as Grammarly, a spell checker, or Google Maps.

One thing

I was recently interviewed on the Naked Ambition podcast with Fiona Triaca, talking about how to accelerate your innovation efforts and get validation to build products that your customers actually want through the power of pretotyping. Check it out!


How to de-risk ideas and save money with pretotyping

Until next month, happy innovating!
Leslie


Previous
Previous

March 2023: Combinatorial Innovation: two birds, one creative stone

Next
Next

January 2023: Predictions, AI and the 10X experiment challenge