Selection of Ai-Genius & AI-Garbage: how to do it?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage in business and enterprise today. As with other successful emerging technologies, it will be necessary to sift the landscape to discern between brilliance and mediocrity. Here are five essential questions that can help you.
#1. Will the ideas developed by AI improve a company’s chances of success?
Entrepreneurship often places disproportionate importance on ideas. A Wharton Experience tested whether AI could generate better ideas than students. The results showed that AI produced a 47% success rate based on ideas that potential buyers would buy, compared to 40% for students. However, is the success of a business more linked to entrepreneurial skills than the initial idea? In fact, among 85 billionaire entrepreneurs, only 1% became successful because of the idea itself. The other 99% were successful because of the entrepreneur’s skills in developing smart strategies that helped beat competitors and the skills to execute them.
#2. Can AI-powered reverse design thinking be better than design thinking for entrepreneurs?
An article in the Harvard Business Review notes that one of the benefits of AI is develop ideas for using a technology before determining the unmet need it can solve. Many entrepreneurs seem to be doing this already: they develop a product and then hope to find a market, which is perhaps why many ideas fail. On the other hand, many great ideas and technologies are rejected before a courageous entrepreneur proves their potential.
· The liquid crystal display was developed to CAR but marketed first by the Japanese. Why didn’t RCA pursue this approach?
· Xerox developed the laser printer, the Alto (computer with mouse) and Ethernet, but others marketed it. Why didn’t Xerox release them?
Are other ideas from AI the answer? The AI must choose winners. Will this happen?
#3. Can AI imitate Steve Jobs? More importantly, should the developer of such an app release or use it?
One of the future benefits of AI would be the development of new successful products, as Steve Jobs did with the iMac. How would we know if the AI algorithm was really a clone of Jobs? And if someone could actually develop and prove an AI clone of Steve Jobs, should they release it?
#4. Can AI do better than venture capital firms struggling to identify talent?
Another article on AI suggests that entrepreneurs act on brilliant ideas and avoid bad ones. But can we separate engineering from garbage given that:
· No one recognized Sam Walton’s brilliant idea of putting big box stores in small towns.
· IBM did not recognize Bill Gates’ brilliant idea of granting it a non-exclusive license for the operating system.
· Few people recognized Michael Dell’s brilliant idea of selling PCs directly to the consumer.
· No one recognized Google’s brilliant search engine: More than 10 venture capital firms rejected the idea, and one company wasn’t willing to buy it when the founders tried to undercut it higher. $1,000,000.
· No one recognized Jobs’ genius when he started Apple. Maybe that’s why he was fired.
If venture capitalists, the leading professionals in venture financing, could accurately predict excellence, why would they fail so frequently? Can AI do better?
#5. Can AI do better than billionaire entrepreneurs at finding the dominant advantage?
Forecasting a winning strategy involves finding the successful combination of products-segments-competitors-sales-drivers to dominate the emerging industry. Can AI achieve this without field testing? If so, does that mean the AI is monitoring everything all the time?
MY OPINION: At the intersection of AI and entrepreneurship, the allure of accelerated idea generation is enticing. Yet the crucial challenge lies in distinguishing between gems and trash for the individual entrepreneur, as well as execution skills. What if 200 entrepreneurs launched their businesses with strategies developed by AI? Can AI accurately identify the skills that will set them apart and lead to success, especially if they use the same AI tool and deploy the same AI-developed strategy?