AI is a great marketing term to describe your product, but building ‘AI’ products is often misguided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI is a new paradigm that we don’t have good intuitions around and probably never will, given its rate of improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s often compared to the internet age, but that was primarily about distribution. Instead, AI is about intelligence\u2014it can create new things<\/strong>, which is fundamentally different. In time, this will break just about every assumption existing businesses are built on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Summarizing why AI matters in the context of building products helps in putting focus on the utility instead of the technology: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In a nutshell, AI gives us all a generational opportunity to reinvent every industry\u2014especially in industries where incumbents predicated on pre-AI assumptions can’t adapt without destroying their current business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best model I have so far to think about building AI products is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n UI is a crutch for human constraints.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Is it odd that it says nothing about AI?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI is just a technology, and technology is just a tool. But building great products is about solving customer problems.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A hack to find customer problems well-suited to AI is by identifying existing tools with complex UIs and long or tedious processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why? Because UI is just a crutch for human constraints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If humans had no constraints and could beam thoughts to and from things, there would be minimal, if any, UI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now, in the early days of AI finally getting good enough, its primary utility is generative grunt work. That may seem trite, but many products have tedious grunt work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here’s the key: Don’t build an AI product.<\/strong> Build a better product that just happens to use AI.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The goal should be to make the AI invisible, not the center of the product. This will force you to focus on solving your customer’s problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And most importantly, this will force you to focus on a specific problem that’s part of a valuable solution rather than a generic AI tool.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Three things to keep in mind about AI:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, start with building the smallest sliver of what’s possible today while you build towards what will be possible tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rate of AI improvement will catch up to your future needs, so tackle low-hanging fruit to establish a foothold and revisit the still-too-hard stuff later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You’ll probably end up with dozens of ideas, so one way to hone in on the most interesting ones is to ask: What’s possible now that wasn’t possible before?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For bonus strategy points, focus on areas where the ‘new way’ requires significant retooling of existing products and incumbents can’t adapt quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy AI matters<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to build with AI<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Where to start<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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