Return to the Fundamentals of Innovation (in the Face of the AI Boom)
By Chris Mele, Siberia
365 hype cycles are designed to pull tech and design organizations away from value creation through true customer centricity. A refocus on problem-oriented product invention and iteration will bring business and users closer together.
While amazing, and surely a generational shift that will meaningfully change the way we create and process content, goods, and services, we need to collectively relax just a little about generative AI.
If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you at least broadly work in the field of innovation and have thusly lived and worked through a myriad of hype cycles — from the dotcom bubble burst to Google Glass, the NFT boom, and I humbly submit, the hysteria around today’s AI explosion. Each arrived with a bullet, and we were told to adapt and adopt like yesterday or face obsolescence.
Some of these shiny objects have taken root (Apple brings in more revenue on AirPods than the entirety of Spotify), while others have withered at astonishing speed (Metaverse task forces around the world have led to a rash of LinkedIn profile rebrands).
We’re all feeling a little windburned from crypto winter, and yet we find ourselves jumping gleefully off the cliff into the era of AI. The robots are coming for your job! To wit, Coke has hired a Global Head of Generative AI, and the machines are creating new sodas.
This is not an underestimation of the technology. Our earliest ML client prototype dates to 2015, shortly after the release of TensorFlow, experimenting with visual search in a retail environment. We are currently working side by side with ON, a Series B AI chat platform approaching their 10-year mark, innovating beyond what is already a sound product/market fit.
This is, however, a broad call to examine the ratio of time and energy invested between the what and the why. While purely an anecdotal hypothesis, I believe the vast majority of our colleagues are over-indexing on thinking about how this very specific piece of technology might impact their near-term horizon, and not enough about what customers, audiences, and users NEED from their brands and businesses to enrich or optimize their lives.
Some of the most compelling innovations of the last decade were built on already established and foundational technology. When COVID hit, QR codes (invented in 1994) were ready. The beloved Domino’s Pizza Tracker is essentially a customer interface built on top of basic point-of-sale and back-office-management systems. In both these cases, the tech was longstanding and ubiquitous. The innovation comes through the use context, and clean and creative application, and sound implementation.
It's not our fault. The 24-hour news cycle and echo chamber of LinkedIn, Reddit, and Discord have been designed to convince founders and operators that if they don’t jump fast and jump now, they will forever be left behind.
Here’s the thing — and it makes for a rather bland headline coming from someone who makes a living in innovation — it’s okay to move at your own pace.
We preach temperance, healthy skepticism, and the practice of innovation via pragmatism.
Before your next big, bold, and expensive pivot, lean into the fundamentals of innovation. Draw insights from data or analysis, clarify the opportunity space, and think creatively about how to fill it. Then launch low impact pilots to validate your hypothesis and run the numbers on whether you have a viable opportunity in front of you.
You may not need a multi-pronged AI strategy. Then again, maybe you do. Do the work and let the signals guide your path. Your users will thank you, and your boss, board, or shareholders will enjoy a less wasteful and ultimately more purpose-driven future.
This post was *not* written with a bot.
Chris Mele, Siberia