How AI is already enabling significant gains in innovation management. This article describes 11 trends and impacts on our innovation processes.
1. AI Makes Everyone an Innovator
AI coaches help develop innovation capabilities. A factory floor worker may have a good idea of how to improve a product, but perhaps not the knowledge to turn it into a viable innovation idea. AI can support them.
Understanding and analyzing large quantities of data becomes easier, allowing more people to leverage this source of innovation.
More importantly: AI shifts the challenge of realizing an innovative idea from execution (such as building a new application or prototype) to the creative side, as AI helps implement it.
2. Conviction and Execution Skills Will Be the Next Differentiators in Corporate Innovation.
When everyone is capable of creating financial models, finding brilliant ideas, and testing things quickly, what is left for us?
The conviction that our company has the right to play and the execution skills to act accordingly. Innovators with a strong sense of “why us,” informed by a combination of AI assistance and personal insight, will win.
3. AI Will Become a Default for 90% of Professionals, Just Like Using the Internet or a Smartphone.
First consequence: it will standardize our way of working. AI will be able to create your innovation process, your governance model, your KPIs, prepare your decision-making committee, and influence many of your decisions.
On the execution side, AI will be able to test hypotheses, build prototypes, simulate customer feedback, etc.
Second consequence: differentiation, which always stems from innovation, will become much more difficult.
4. AI Will Lead to the Triumph of Data-Driven Decision-Making.
Senior leaders will begin to expect teams to bring them a large amount of data to support their recommendations… because they will become accustomed to how AI can do it.
Over time, if AI does not provide increasingly more information and recommendations, leaders will be less and less inclined to listen to them.
At some point, this could lead to AI taking over growth activities and, potentially, AI becoming the head of innovation, etc.
5. AI Creates a Tinder for Innovation Partnerships
More and more companies are considering innovation partnerships, for example with startups, to realize their innovation ideas.
The crucial part is matchmaking: Finding the right innovation partner. AI can help solve this problem.
6. The Evolution of AI Tests the Limits of Our Curiosity and Thirst for Rapid Learning.
AI development is not slowing down, and early adopters will be exponentially better equipped than laggards. Innovators who want to remain relevant will constantly need to stay updated on the latest tools and maintain their curiosity.
The “conviction” mentioned above will be useless if you are not using the latest tools while your competitor masters them. If you are still using GPT while your competitor has five agents working for them, you will be left in the dust, and this magnitude of change occurs every few months, not years.
7. AI Will ALWAYS Be a Lagging Force for at Least the Next Decade.
AI will not be able to understand humans and how they react and adapt to a constantly evolving world.
Unpredictable events and behaviors will always occur. Differentiation will always be possible for teams that have a vision of possible futures and a portfolio of bold bets.
8. AI Will Help Reduce Our Innate Biases.
Many innovation decisions are skewed by biases such as groupthink, confirmation bias, etc. And while it is easy to highlight the cultural/societal biases reflected by AI today, over time, AI trained with a massive amount of data could identify where teams develop biased perspectives and make biased decisions and correct them… and perhaps identify new opportunities/ideas revealed when biases are eliminated.
9. Humans Will Crave Unique Human Experiences Even More.
Finding ways to facilitate activities such as ideation and brainstorming in exclusively human environments will become something we desire even more, while our AI counterparts will handle things that do not make us feel connected.
Being aware of what AI will and will not do for you will help you stay grounded regarding less tangible cultural factors.
10. AI Will Never Be Able to Deliver New, Innovative Products and Services at Scale on Its Own.
The ability to deliver and commercialize the best possible product or service will therefore remain a significant differentiator.
11. In the Age of AI, Startups Will Have a Huge Advantage When Launching New Products and Services.
Over the next five years, startups that are able to adopt new open-source and proprietary AI tools and models will be able to rapidly launch new products and services, thus threatening incumbent operators who are constrained by policy creation, usage prohibitions, and risk management.
This brings us back to prediction No. 5: it will be increasingly important to understand and evaluate what is happening in the startup world, as well as to have partnership mechanisms that work for your business.
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