👇 My Prediction on the Three Stages of AI Adoption 👇 👇 👇
As we end a year filled with AI-hype, no one can deny that we’re in a new era in tech and AI will play a pivotal role in shaping business ops.
My experiences and observations have led me to predict 3 distinct stages in the adoption of AI within companies:
1️. The “Support” Stage: Operational Efficiency is the Starting Point 🛠️
Initially, AI will be leveraged as an operational efficiency tool. Companies will begin to integrate AI tools to optimize support, enhance response times, and improve Net Promoter Scores (NPS). A personal testament to this stage is a solution I prototyped for my company in December 2022 (during the start of the hype cycle). I combined OpenAI’s API, Zapier, and Slack to prototype a support chatbot. We’re now seeing purpose-built SaaS products exemplify this initial adoption phase and providing foundational AI tools for businesses. (Shout out to Simon Høiberg’s Aidbase which I saw yesterday — it looks phenomenal at creating an AI-based support ecosystem).
2️. The “Supplement” Stage: AI is a Tool in Workflow Integration 🌐
The next phase involves companies adopting AI solutions into current customer workflows. This stage is about supplementing and enhancing existing workflows, with a focus on voice, analytics, efficiency, and automation. It also offers a solution to job churn and the challenge of filling roles vacated by retirees. (Shout out to one of the prime examples in my current space — Eleos Health. Their use of AI, or ‘augmented reality’ as they’ve described it, utilizes voice-based NLP to deliver insights in behavioral health).
3. The “Shift”: Solving New Use Cases 🔮
The final stage is what I call “The Shift”. Here, AI will start solving problems we didn’t know existed and create capabilities beyond our current vision. We’re already seeing glimpses of this: transforming still images into videos, generating slide presentations from a few bullet points, or, probably the most prevalent one so far, Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator for instant, high-quality visual content. This is just the tip of the iceberg, with many more applications to come.
👉 These 3 stages aren’t going to be sequential and they won’t look the same for every business. Every company will have their own journey of AI adoption and must think about how this is not just a technological advancement but a transformative process reshaping how we work, think, and solve problems.
👉 As companies, and as product managers, it’s vital for us to stay abreast of these developments and embrace the potential of AI to remain competitive and innovative.
Let me know what you think!
Shoutout to Shantel for sitting down with me a couple of weeks ago to talk about these stages.
