AI is all the rage these days. You can’t go to a conference without seeing session after session on how companies are utilizing AI in their platforms. But what are some interesting uses for AI in your everyday job? I had the opportunity to use AI while working on a complex technology idea recently.
We work with some of the largest brands in the world. I was recently tapped by a very smart guy at a global company to help thresh out an idea for a large retailer that would have a significant revenue impact. We put our collective heads together and ideated a net new concept that would upend 50 years of how traditional retail sold to their customers.
Seeing that this technology driven idea was radical, I was immediately concerned with its viability. Going back to my time at Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management, I remembered being in an entrepreneurship class where we had to team up and create a company in 10 weeks. On week 3 we presented our concepts to the combined class where our classmates would immediately try to poke holes our business models. Bear in mind this was 20 years ago – where people were more concerned with facts and outcomes than people’s feelings. It was brutal, but critically necessary. We took this harsh feedback and made our business models better over the next 7 weeks, ultimately presenting our concepts and products to a panel of VCs. Those who ignored their classmate’s harsh feedback paid a very dear price in front of the VCs.
As I was mulling this over, I realized that by using AI, I could replicate this same feedback loop I got in that classroom. However, instead of a classroom with 120 Kellogg MBAs, I could use the collective intelligence of the entire world via AI.
I input our radical retail idea into both MS Copilot and ChatGPT-4 and simply asked the AI to punch holes in our concept. In both cases, the AI complimented our innovative idea and then proceeded to list 5-7 areas where the AI saw challenges to our ultimate success. Funny thing – the AI was much kinder than my student colleagues were!
Interestingly both AI’s provided similar feedback, but it was not identical. Another positive was that none of the areas of concern were insurmountable. (We didn’t break the laws of physics). We presented our AI-enhanced idea to the company CEO. In addition to liking the idea, he was able to provide -specific feedback that we are building into the technical model. In the end, the AI was very helpful in 1) verifying our idea was achievable and 2) giving specific feedback that helped us improve our idea. Interesting Note: I feed this article into AI to generate an image for the article. The first one had people sitting around a conference room table. I enhanced the image by telling AI to represent the humans in an MBA style classroom. You can definitely tell the image on this article is AI generated, but hey… it’s not bad! How have you used AI to help you in your job function? Let me know in the comments.
