Augment and Invent

💡 In a recent substack post (link), the always insightful Rishad Tobaccowala presents "10 thoughts about AI, Humans and Work in 10 minutes". They are all worth pondering (although I would not invoke Suleyman in # 3) but one that struck a chord with me, Thought # 6, summarizes two important themes: human augmentation and business (re)invention. Here is the thought:

"6. The simpler questions are about efficiency and effectiveness. The real question is more existential. AI will deliver efficiencies by getting things done faster and cheaper and as importantly more effectively by unleashing insights and freeing talent to work on areas where humans excel and let the math and pattern finding and the rest be done by the machine. But the smart companies are thinking about how to re-invent, re-imagine and re-think their business. In the world we live today with distributed and unbundled work, next generation technologies and multi-polar globalization why are more companies not re-imagining their businesses versus just focussing on making yesterdays model cheaper and more effective?"

Obvious pockets of inefficiencies will be addressed with hashtag#AI in the short term by businesses, thereby quickly eliminating any competitive advantage (a point made very nicely by Martin Reeves in a recent HBR article link). Any sustainable advantage will have to come from new ideas about augmentation (that amplify a company's unique assets) and from novel ideas in general for businesses.

So, first, augmentation. I have been for 25 years a proponent of thinking about "unleashing insights and freeing talent to work on areas where humans excel and let the math and pattern finding and the rest be done by the machine". What is missing from a lot of the discourse on augmentation is what form it should take, specifically, how do humans and AIs interface? The chatbot form factor has been surprisingly effective (surprising to me at least) at opening floodgates of creativity from all kinds of horizons. It can't be the last frontier of human-AI interfacing. That needs to be invented.

Which takes us to the second part: (re)invention. The winners will use hashtag#genAI to create new products, services, experiences that are not even conceivable without AI. Business model disruption driven by AI is just beginning. When you product or service can be 80% replaced by a self-serve AI-based version at 0.001% of the cost, you have to seriously rethink where you create value. And as Rishad Tobaccowala writes in thought # 7, "A company’s best opportunities and threats are likely come from outside its immediate category and AI allows it to extend into new areas."