Build GenAI Solutions Around Real Customer Problems
Identify who you’re building for, which customer problems matter most, and what will earn repeat GenAI usage—not just one-time trials.
Key GenAI Customer Understanding Challenges
Customer understanding breaks down when teams aren’t clear on the user, the job, or what people will actually adopt. That’s when leaders start asking customer questions like:
Are we...
…clear on who we are really building this for?
…focused on the customer problem that matters most?
…earning user trust in real work?
…creating enough value to make customers return repeatedly?
…removing the experience friction that could slow adoption?
The Bottom-Line
Better GenAI starts with sharper customer understanding, clearer jobs to be done, and experiences people actually trust.
Turn customer insight into GenAI solutions that matter
Grounded in practical customer and product discovery, our Understand Your GenAI Customers Playbook helps leaders identify real user needs, pain points, and high-value use cases that high-impact AI solutions must solve.
Understand Your GenAI Customer
Launch Pad
Launch Pad
Weeks 1 - 4
Baseline Your Readiness
Develop a clear measure of your current state readiness including:
- Structured 1:1 discovery sessions to clarify priorities, adoption maturity, and scaling constraints
- A targeted readiness scan to assess your baseline readiness
- An executive brief covering GenAI customer strategy best practices and their implications
2 Hr. Leadership Alignment & Action Planning Session
A high-impact leadership working session focused on:
- Introducing scalable methods to understand customer problems and shape higher-impact GenAI solutions
- Exploring applied Use Cases, adoption best practices, and key “Watch Outs”
- Aligning on an actionable scaling plan
Understand Your GenAI Customer
Mission Control & Lift-Off
Mission Control & Lift-Off
Weeks 5 - 12
Benchmark Assessment + Acceleration Guides
Develop a clear view of how to Understand Your GenAI Customers, including:
- Identifying and prioritizing key GenAI Customer Understanding gaps
- Exploring our 13 GenAI Customer Understanding Acceleration Guides
- Leveraging a GenAI Strategist-led planning session to define your action plan
Define your readiness assessment + enablement needs and plan for your GenAI Customer Understanding
Explore core concepts & methods in our GenAI Customer Understanding certification series, including:
- Prioritizing Your GenAI Use Cases
- Segmenting Your GenAI Customers & Prospects
- Understanding Your Customer’s Needs, Wants, and Barriers to Adoption
- Defining Your Target GenAI User Experience
- Co-deliver quick wins to “make it stick” and accelerate your target state delivery goals
Understand Your GenAI Customer
Mission Accelerate
Mission Accelerate
Weeks 12+
Scaling Play Book Design & Implementation
Configure and operationalize your scaling approach, including:
- Configuring and customizing your Understanding GenAI Customers scaling playbook
- Operationalizing your Understanding GenAI Customers Target Operating Model (TOM)
- Optimizing and evolving your TOM
Insights Design & Implementation Support
Turn data into insights and insights into action by:
- Configuring and customizing your GenAI Customer Understanding metrics and insights plan
- Operationalizing your GenAI Customer Understanding Insights Plan and Operational Processes
- Optimizing and evolving your insights
Weekly Quick Wins
An actionable set of applied Quick Wins to build and sustain momentum, structured as:
- < 30 Days Wins: Lightly configurable resources and solutions
- 30 – 60 Day Wins: Lightly customizable Quick Wins
- 60 – 90 Day Wins: Increasingly high value Quick Win deliverables
Your Acceleration Plan
- Baseline what you know about your target GenAI customers, needs, and adoption drivers
- Tailor the plan to the customer segments, unmet needs, and adoption barriers most likely to shape demand
- Deliver Quick Wins, build capability, and scale priority solutions through one integrated plan
Your Comms Plan
- Identify your priority stakeholders, communication needs, and customer understanding gaps
- Configure and deliver a tailored GenAI Customer Understanding communications plan, custom Comms Hub, and role-specific enablement assets
- Build and sustain momentum with explainers, demos, videos, and proof points.
Your Change Plan
- Define your quarterly GenAI Customer Understanding review, optimization, and adaptation process
- Enable quarterly strategy and scaling plan updates, with rapid response to major market, innovation, and competitor shifts
- Keep your GenAI Customer Understanding approach evergreen by continuously refining target needs, value drivers, and priorities,
On-Demand Coaching
- Identify where your teams need targeted coaching to overcome customer understanding, prioritization, or insight gaps
- Deliver tailored expert support, working sessions, and practical guidance
- Help your teams sharpen customer understanding, improve decision-making, and keep your GenAI Customer Understanding efforts moving forward
Choose Your On-Ramp...
Choose the starting point that fits your customer understanding urgency, maturity, and scope—from focused alignment to quick wins or a full playbook.
An Accelerated Alignment & Action Planning Sprint
A fast-paced leadership alignment and action planning sprint to:
- Baseline your current GenAI customer understanding maturity
- Explore best practices
- Align on top priorities
- Define your path forward
- Identify near-term Quick Wins
Accelerate & De-Risk Your GenAI Customer Understanding Journey
Confidently scale your GenAI Customer Understanding with a tailored TOM that helps you turn customer insight into sharper priorities and action.
Targeted GenAI Customer Understanding Solutions
Rapidly solve targeted GenAI Customer Understanding scaling challenges, including:
- Baseline your current customer understanding and insight gaps
- Solve a high-priority customer understanding challenge
- Clarify your target users, needs, and priorities
- Align on practical actions to move forward
- Deliver focused progress in a matter of weeks
“This helped us better understand where GenAI could solve real customer problems and where it would’ve added noise instead of value.”
VP, Engineering, Global Retailed
Outcomes you can expect
Insight
Build a deeper understanding of your GenAI customers, their needs, and the outcomes they care about most.
Empathy
Strengthen your ability to see GenAI opportunities through the lens of the customer experience.
Focus
Concentrate your teams on the customer needs, use cases, and opportunities that matter most.
Relevance
Improve how well your GenAI solutions align to real customer workflows, expectations, and value drivers.
Impact
Turn stronger customer understanding into better solution choices, sharper priorities, and more meaningful business results.
Complimentary Resources
Curious About What “Great Looks Like”?
Review our “GenAI Customer Understanding” Whitepaper
Want to See How You Compare?
Complete our GenAI Customer Understanding Scan or Assessment
Want an easy way to come up to speed?
Click here to listen to our GenAI Customer Understanding Podcast
Want to dig deeper?
Click here to check out our library of YouTube videosFrequently Asked Questions
1. Why do this now?
2. What will we get?
3. Will it work here?
4. How do we make it real?
5. How do we make it stick?
- Why do we need stronger GenAI customer understanding now?
Because GenAI only creates value when it solves the right problems for the right users. - What outcomes should we expect from this work?
Deeper insight, sharper priorities, more relevant solutions, and stronger adoption potential. - What happens if we don’t understand our GenAI customer well enough?
Teams build solutions that miss real needs, workflows, and moments that matter.
- What do you mean by “GenAI customer understanding”?
A clear view of who the solution serves, what they need, and where they struggle. - What are the main deliverables from this work?
Sharper customer insight, clearer needs, and sharper focus. - What do “Quick Wins” look like in GenAI Customer Understanding work?
Clarify target users, validate pain points, and focus on highest-value needs.
- Does this only apply to external customers?
No—it applies to external customers and internal users alike. - Can this work if we already know our customers well?
Yes—it turns broad customer knowledge into sharper GenAI requirements, jobs, and experience choices. - Does this work across different GenAI use cases?
Yes—it works across copilots, assistants, workflow tools, and knowledge experiences where fit matters.
- How do you identify the GenAI needs that matter most?
We focus on the jobs, pain points, and unmet needs where GenAI can help most. - How do you keep this from becoming too broad or abstract?
We keep it grounded in real users, workflows, pain points, and product choices. - How do you connect customer understanding to solution design?
We turn customer insight into sharper use cases, UX choices, and product decisions.
- Who should be involved from our side?
Product leaders, business stakeholders, and customer-facing teams closest to user needs and friction. - How do you build alignment around which customer needs matter most?
We rank needs by customer importance, business value, and GenAI fit. - How do we sustain this after the initial work is done?
We keep customer insight in the roadmap, solution design, and adoption decisions.
Start with Understanding What Customers Need from GenAI