By Jim Lundy
How Product Teams Can Embrace and Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The race to create Intelligent products is here and with that comes a need to understand the potential of what Machine and Deep Learning can do so that future products and services can be designed, developed and marketed.
This blog discusses the need for Product Managers to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Your Product is Falling Behind and You Don’t Know Why
This is something that keeps every Chief Executive Office (CEO) up at night – future revenue based on future products.
The scenario is this: your top competitor launches a new version of their product that is predictive and intelligent. Your team has no plan in place. Is this a nightmare scenario? No, it is actually what is happening today.
Product Teams are falling behind because they don’t understand AI and the application of it.
To Embrace AI, You Must First Understand What It Does
Many think of AI as just a set of buzzwords. That is the first mistake. AI is about fundamentally taking a dumb application and making it intelligent (to some level) by allowing the application to look at data and make predictions. This is where the idea of predictive applications comes into play.
Some call predictive – predictive analytics but at Aragon we are talking about predictive applications. In 2015, we identified three areas in Sales and Marketing that would become predictive and eventually they did: Predictive Leads, Predictive Opportunities and Predictive Forecasts.
A few vendors offered these capabilities and jumped ahead a few years and Salesforce launched Einstein Sales Cloud with those three exact capabilities. Einstein Sales Cloud is a completely different application than its analog counterpart.
In fact, today, C3.ai, Microsoft, and Oracle all have an AI based CRM offering. Why are they not flying off the shelves? Well, in part it is due to perceptions that the products don’t work (they do) and poor marketing by the vendors.
Getting to Know AI Now
All Engineering Managers, Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers need to understand AI and its potential. This is not optional, it is the new race.
Aragon Research has been doing a number of strategy sessions on what we call building AI Fighter Jets (aka Intelligent Applications), This is due in part to demand and in part to the fact that we have seen what has been happening in more than a few markets.
Bottom Line
AI is here to stay and done properly it can help to take an existing application and make it much more useful to business leaders.
While some say that AI is expensive, the truth is that it is much cheaper and easier to deploy than most realize.
The question you need to ask yourself is – what future products will drive your future revenue – and when will they be intelligent.
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO, Jim Lundy.
