This is what it means for your business
Ok, so once you’ve put AI in context, the next challenge is to anchor it to the unique conditions that affect your business, and the levers that drive value and cost.
Depending on the culture and competitive landscape of your business, either, or both, of these statements may resonant more:
- AI represents the single biggest competitive advantage for your business in the 2020s
- AI provides the capabilities, impetus and scale-readiness for your competitors to destroy your business within the next five years - be that today’s incumbents or tomorrow’s start-ups
Therefore reinventing your business now as AI-native isn’t nice to have, it’s existential. But what does ‘reinventing as AI-native’ mean? For most businesses we deal with it is a combination of these three things:
- Novel usage of AI that drastically increases the impact, customer personalisation and scale of the unique value you offer your customers today
- Massively (>10x) reducing your cost base through AI automation and augmentation
- Employ and retain the next generation of AI-native talent in your business
To do that you need to invest sensibly where you have unique assets that enable you to create value that isn’t trivial for others to copy.
When you focus on the unique propositions you build, they need to rely on at least one, and ideally all, of these differentiating factors:
- Your unique data
- Your unique talent and know-how
- Your unique market access and brand
For example, if you’re a bank, becoming the best at AI-enabled relationship management for business banking customers is a highly valuable, highly differentiated proposition - where you have unique data, talent and market access today to win compared to others.
Conversely, having the best custom AI-powered finance management platform is, while useful, not where you have all these ingredients, as such investing here has a far greater chance of getting caught up and overtaken by the Big Tech firms that specialise in that finance management software.
