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Christian Wiklund is the cofounder and CEO at unitQ.
The rise of AI has reshaped industries overnight, radically altering how organizations operate and innovate at once unthinkable speed and scale. Organizations that don’t get on board this revolutionary train do so at their own risk.
This seemingly overnight technological transformation ushered in by artificial intelligence, however, is not just about speed and scale. For business leaders, it’s about redefining how companies approach the creative process and product development.
Consider Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. The CEO was a genius at navigating the intersection of innovation and customer desires. This was key to his visionary product development process.
Merging Customer Preferences With Advancing Tech
Jobs believed it was the task of innovators to anticipate needs that customers did not even voice. Jobs also recognized the importance of an interactive process, one merging customer insights with advancing technological possibilities.
“You have to merge these points of view, and you have to do it in an interactive way over a period of time, which doesn’t mean a week,” he told Inc. Magazine. “It takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want, and it takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give.”
What Has Changed In Jobs’ Aftermath
Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple introduced a long list of groundbreaking technologies that included the iPod and iPhone—radically altering the way we communicate while redefining and creating entirely new markets like the App Store.
But a lot has changed following Jobs leading Apple to become one of the world’s most well-known and largest companies by market cap today. In the new age of AI, the manner in which organizations can balance their vision with the voice of the customer has evolved exponentially.
Jobs Did Not Have Today’s AI
There’s no doubt that Jobs’ approach to innovation clearly highlighted the importance of anticipating customer needs. That ethos remains relevant today. But the new age of AI suggests we revisit Jobs’ view that “it takes a long time to pull out of customers what they really want, and it takes a long time to pull out of technology what it can really give.”
Today, business leaders can integrate AI into their product development and customer insight processes to develop at an elevated pace never before seen.
How To Ride The AI Train
For starters, business leaders should recognize that the AI train is here. The genie is out of the bottle. Your competitors are riding this train, or they’re readying to board.
So, when it comes to product development, adopt AI as a complementary tool that generates product ideas that human teams question, validate, refine or even scrap. Company leaders should articulate what development opportunities or problems AI should address, while at the same time vetting ideas from within or outside the organization. This shift in the development process enables human ingenuity to thrive, while at the same time, it’s being guided by AI insights.
Jobs’ Gift To Business Leaders
Let’s not forget the voice of the customer.
With new mobile and digital touchpoints created in Jobs’ era, customers today now leave a treasure trove of invaluable insights about their preferences and how they use organizations’ products and services across a widely available and global digital footprint—from app store reviews, social media and support tickets to surveys and more.
While AI now empowers companies to launch and build products at unprecedented speed and scale, it also enables organizations to listen to, understand and take action on what their customers are saying and how they’re engaging—at an equally unprecedented speed and scale. Tap into those real-time actionable insights as part of the ongoing development process.
And of course, in the development of products and services, your teams should adopt AI as part of their functions. Artificial intelligence can enhance engineers’ coding, support staff’s interactions with customers and marketing’s messaging, as well as the sales and customer success teams’ strategies.
To get there, provide in-house training specific to teams across your organization, as well as cross-functional AI education. Don’t forget to encourage staff—from the C-suite to the mailroom—to engage with AI platforms regardless of their technical skills.
By blending Jobs’ vision with AI’s ability to unearth insights at an unimaginable pace, business leaders have an opportunity to build products today that seize the magic of Jobs’ era—all while pushing the envelope of what’s possible in our own.
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