“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” – Justin Trudeau – Prime Minister of Canada
GenAI has already begun to accelerate the pace of innovation and product development, and we haven’t seen anything yet…
GenAI is going to simplify and accelerate customer and market research
Customer and market research have traditionally been time consuming and are often the first activities dropped when timelines get tight. The good news is that GenAI is enabling simpler, customized interactions with customers and prospects as you test new ideas and gather feedback. The same is true for market research, where tools like ChatGPT do a remarkable job of aggregating market insights and macro-economic trends. Human analysis and synthesization is still required, but the data collection process is orders of magnitude simpler.
Prototyping potential solutions is much faster and less expensive
Platforms like Figma are rapidly introducing GenAI-enabled functionality into their platforms. The capability to rapidly prototype low and moderate fidelity prototypes from natural language inputs is beginning to accelerate digital prototyping in similar ways that 3-D Printing has transformed physical prototyping.
You’ll need to validate a wider range of variables
The early stage of GenAI maturity and adoption means you’ll have a broad set of new variables you’ll need to test and validate across your innovation and solution delivery efforts. First, you’ll need to address the new Secure and Responsible AI requirements and validate your ability to bring your idea to market without exposing your organization to undue risks. You’ll also need to validate that your target users are ready and interested in adopting these new capabilities, while validating the technical feasibility of your new ideas.
Applied Product Development is going to accelerate – a lot…
Preliminary statistics have shown that GenAI-enabled code assistance can drive efficiencies of 40%+ for defined tasks. Sample tasks that can easily be automated with GenAI today include configuring new development environments, generating automated testing, and documenting and summarizing development efforts. While the solutions aren’t perfect, they are very effective and are rapidly maturing. The effect – product development efforts are going to go from initial ideation to working solutions faster than ever…
Product Lifecycles are going to compress further – you’re going to have to get faster to keep up…
What We’re Seeing in Practice
The cumulative effect of these capabilities is that product lifecycles are going to continue compressing. That means that competitive advantages are going to be increasingly fleeting, and companies that are able to continually innovate, in targeted ways, will thrive. Conversely, those that struggle to streamline their innovation and solution delivery capabilities, are going to struggle to keep up.
- Most custom GenAI solutions aren’t quite ready to scale yet: There are still many aspects of LLM-based solutions that struggle to scale from targeted prototype to customer-facing enterprise quality solutions as of Q1, 2024. Whether the challenges relate to how data is ingested for augmented responses, high-levels of latency, or predictability and repeatability issues, there’s still a significant delta between the promise and the reality of how these solutions are performing. These issues are likely to be largely resolved in 2024, so it’s important to start work on them now, but they’re certainly not ‘Plug and Play’ today.
- Small-scale prototypes are a great way to bring your teams up to speed: You can hit the ground running right away, though, with small scale Proof of Concept (PoC) and prototype efforts. This gives team members an opportunity to explore the underlying capabilities, design targeted user experiences, and iteratively solve the challenges referenced above.
- GenAI-enabled code-generation requires a lot of training, but it’s getting better quickly: GitHub Co-Pilot has already made tremendous strides in its ability to accelerate application development and provide ‘in-flow’ recommendations for developers. Other platforms are following suit, and they’re getting better quickly. While they’re not a panacea, and organizations need to be thoughtful about how they’re used, they are going to significantly streamline and accelerate the application development process moving forward.
- GenAI will be adopted across the full product lifecycle in the near future: From user and market research, to prototyping and accelerated development, and through detailed monitoring, GenAI capabilities are being adopted across the full innovation and development lifecycle, with significant implications for insights, speed, and impact.
- A growing gap between best in class and the ‘rest of the pack’: Organizations that combine GenAI capabilities with streamlined research, innovation, development, and continuous improvement capabilities are pulling further and further away from their competition. Capability gaps or misalignment across the innovation, delivery, continuous improvement lifecycle slow the flow of value and ultimately limit an organization’s overall competitiveness.
“There’s a way to do it better – find it.” – Thomas Edison
GenAI is going to play a critical role in enabling high-impact innovation and product development moving forward. You’ll need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how you leverage these new capabilities, but start experimenting now, as the pace of innovation is already quickening!
This is the fourth blog of an integrated ‘Keys to Winning with GenAI’ series. Please click below to explore the remaining ‘deeper dive’ topics.
Previous Blogs in the series:
- Accelerated Innovations ‘Keys to Winning’ with GenAI
- Defining a Compelling GenAI ‘True North’ for Your Business
- Ensuring You Have the Talent & Capabilities to Win with GenAI
- Building and Sustaining Momentum for your GenAI Adoption Efforts
To learn more about Accelerated Innovation’s end-to-end GenAI enablement services, or specific topics of interest, schedule a call to start your GenAI journey.
