Does your business deliver better results than AI?
The bottom line.
Ultimately most businesses exist to solve one or more problems faced by their customers.
Restaurants solve the problem of being hungry.
Gyms solve the problem of wanting to exercise but not having the right equipment or skills.
Amazon (temporarily) solves the problem of people wanting stuff.
Every business should be crystal clear on what problem(s) it is solving for its customers. That’s step number 1.
With that clear in your mind you’ll be better positioned to think about how changing technology, and AI in particular, could impact your business and when.
As I wrote about last week, it’s not a matter of technology simply replicating specific tasks. The key question is this: Can the customer solve his or her problem faster, cheaper, or in a more satisfying fashion using some other means besides your business?
Your personal opinion about the quality of the alternative solutions is irrelevant. All that matters is what the consumer will prefer.
That question has been on my mind a lot as I’ve watched the recent competing Microsoft-Google press conferences. Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search engine has started rolling out to the world over the past week. It seems likely that Google will follow suit shortly.
This means that within a matter of weeks or months basically everyone will be interacting with powerful AI tools on a daily basis every time they ask a question of the internet. How many searches do you perform each day?
If your business involves some element of finding and curating information, and then repackaging that information to help solve your customers’ problems (as mine and innumerable other knowledge economy businesses do) then I would be following these developments very closely.