It’s been a year and a half… what have you achieved with AI?

It’s amazing to think that it has been a year and a half since the generative AI craze hit the streets. Incredible because the amount of opportunity created by AI is substantial, but different businesses find themselves in different places. In some cases, powerful outcomes have been achieved that justify the hype. In other cases, companies have struggled to gain ground. What are there reasons that some have achieved progress and some have not?

The first question I ask is… where are you in this cycle? Have you moved forward from envisioning, or are you just getting started? The most successful companies have been very intentional about aligning the strategy of their business with the outcomes they seek. This isn’t just about picking a use case, it’s about understanding the mission of your business and how AI can help achieve that outcome.

So, the best way for me to ask you to evaluate your progress is to pose it in the context of other’s successes. The following are ways I’ve seen individual companies change their business. Yes, I know there are people who say, “over-hype”, but both anecdotal and objective evidence shows that effective commitment and alignment that leverages transformative AI technology leads to powerful outcomes.

Think about all of the above. What have you achieved? Have you won more deals, eased customer frustration, reduced inventory costs, set better expectations, created employee efficiencies, driven a new revenue stream, or found non-intuitive insights? Or… are you still talking about it, or just waiting?

I want to highlight three themes that I see in successful organizations. The themes capture the intentional choices that companies need to make in order to get to positive outcomes. They come with the base idea that “the hardest company to disrupt is your own”. This comes from the same place that the “hardest person to disrupt is yourself”. Why is that so hard?!? Because we have a difficult time stopping existing habits to form new habits. How many New Year’s Resolutions have you seen fall apart because a new habit was never formed. How many successful companies (think Blockbuster) didn’t change their business model when they were successful, only to be disrupted later.

There are three themes to highlight, the first is “what needs to be true”. There are a few people talking about this, one of which is Brian Evergreen, former Microsoft, with an excellent book Autonomous Transformation. He has a similar idea called “Future Solving”. I’ve always thought of it through the idea of “what needs to be true” or “starting with the end in mind”. This means visioning a possible future and then understanding the activities that are necessary to achieve that end. Instead of just focusing on problems to be solved, think about a future to achieve and the means to achieve it.

The second idea is “jobs to be done”, sometimes called Jobs Theory. The idea here is that we need to think about the actual outcomes produces as a result of the work done by our company. You’ve likely heard, “they didn’t want 2 inch drill bits, they wanted 2 inch holes”… or even more, they didn’t want holes or bits, or screws, they just wanted two boards connected to each other. This theory understands that there will always be evolving ways to accomplish outomes and our goal is to enable those outcomes in a more capable way.

The third idea is “disruptive innovation”, popularized by Clayton Christensen (RIP). The idea of disruptive innovation is that successful products fall into a trap. The trap is that they keep iterating on what made them successful, but neglect a low-end disruption in the market from a less “capable” tool, but more agile or new delivery model. Think about how blockbuster was disrupted by Netflix. Blockbuster could have added as many features to its stores and competed with Family Video and never won the battle with Netflix that it never saw coming.

In the diagram above you see this idea depicted. Two companies are competing for market share, with AI providing two possible outcomes. The first is efficiencies that enable more market share to go to “My Revenue”. This is a short term strategy and it is often necessary and beneficial. The future strategy is in the market that neither company can harness and is achieved through new innovation. I encourage companies to think about both, but in the choice between “pain” and “vitamin”, neither is the vitamin. They are both possible pains or threats to the landscape of the company, one is just occurring sooner and the other is more existential.

This may be a moment to comment on a key to success, which is investing in the right area and thinking “big” enough. I’m not against quick wins or even starting small, scaling fast… but those that fail to “think big” often under-invest in their AI efforts in both tech and skilling. They understand that AI is an important technology, but they don’t act that way. They under-hype the possible outcomes, tiptoe around, and fail to get movement. The best companies understand that “thinking big” can still “start small”, but needs to “scale fast” to achieve the desired success. The “scaling fast” is often your AI upskilling campaign, which is a very sophisticated endeavor and something we need to take seriously. If AI is going to impact every person, we need to impact every person. I’ve written about this before, but it is more than just tech skills… it includes creativity, delegation to AI agents, growth mindset, and more.

So, I’ll leave you with this. If you aren’t actualizing the mission of your business with AI, you’re doing it wrong. The entire point of AI and any digital technology for that matter, is to accelerate the mission of your business. Let this be a moment where that happens.