Article Summary: How AI Will Revolutionize Product Development by Caroline Forsey and Deepam Mishra

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New advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are set to make product development a swifter, less expensive process. In this helpful article, HubSpot’s Caroline Forsey interviews Deepam Mishra, Amazon Web Services’ Senior Advisor to Startups, about the primary ways AI is transforming the product development process. Mishra discusses common obstacles to successful product development, including “poor product-market fit,” and he covers the ways AI can hasten prototyping and boost your understanding of customer feedback. He also offers valuable tips to help your start-up or small-to-medium business start using AI for product development.

Take-Aways

• Artificial intelligence (AI) can help companies more swiftly and accurately analyze market data and consumer feedback.
• AI can make product prototyping and staff onboarding easier and faster.
• AI can take on the rote work involved in product development, allowing your employees to focus on more creative tasks.
• Embrace experimentation, select targeted areas of your business for AI integration and seek backing from your stakeholders to invest in AI.

Summary

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help companies more swiftly and accurately analyze market data and consumer feedback.

Inaccurate market-fit information is the prime reason 33% of all start-ups fail. Artificial intelligence’s data-gathering and analysis capabilities make it a perfect tool for helping companies assess whether the products they’re developing will serve real customer needs. AI can examine both quantitative and qualitative data to determine the likelihood that a product will catch on with its intended audience. It can also help you uncover new consumer insights, which can, in turn, spur new product development.

“AI can make it easier to understand the real customer needs hiding behind known problems.” (Deepam Mishra)

AI can offer a lot of help in organizing and interpreting feedback and other information. Mishra notes that as much as 70% to 80% of corporate information exists in unstructured forms, such as paper work, emails and social media posts. Historically, companies have struggled to analyze such material effectively. However, generative AI can help structure and interpret such information for maximum utility, so you can use it to determine market fit, identify your product’s best or most problematic features, and more.

As Mishra explains, “Generative AI can help convert customer feedback into data for your business.”

AI can make product prototyping and staff onboarding easier and faster.

AI can speed up prototyping and help companies control costs. Creating a prototype generally involves a team of people working for one to three months on a digital mock-up of a potential product and then spending up to a month to create a visual model, such as a 3D-printed, physical rendition. AI could cut the production time on prototpyes to mere hours, thus saving substantial resources and all but eliminating prototyping’s cost-related risks.

“Often engineers start building prototypes without a deep understanding of the quantitative and qualitative customer needs.” (Deepam Mishra)

Onboarding new team members is another time-and-money-intensive function AI can help address. Today, senior employees often must devote large chunks of time to onboarding new hires. Chat-based AI could take over many training sessions. Other AI tools can help make sure that anything a new employee produces – from software code to product prototypes – conforms to company guidelines.

AI can take on the rote work involved in product development, allowing your employees to focus on more creative tasks.

New AI tools learn as they perform, producing better results over time.Therefore, AI will soon be capable of serving as a valuable “co-pilot” for designers, product managers and engineers.

“Change is happening quickly, and it can be difficult to determine which aspects of AI you should invest in or how you should approach implementing it into your current processes.”

AI can handle the rote tasks associated with these roles, leaving their human counterparts with more time to think creatively – not just about individual products, but about the overarching concept of users’ product experience.

Embrace experimentation, select targeted areas of your business for AI integration and seek backing from your stakeholders to invest in AI.

If you are interested in integrating AI into your product development process but unsure if the investment is worthwhile, you’re not alone. But, Mishra warns, if you do nothing, you risk being left in your competition’s wake.

“If you‘re unsure where to get started on your own team, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Consider reaching out to cloud experts or startups that can walk you through some common solutions already being explored by other companies.”

Businesses that want to begin applying new AI tools can take three steps:

1. Embrace experimentation – Getting started is, in many ways, the most challenging part of anything new. The same holds with AI tech. Ease your way in with small experiments, such as using AI to analyze customer feedback. Your company can select among various streaming services, such as Netflix or Amazon, which offer recommendations based on AI’s analysis of consumer’s previous actions. Off-the-shelf products include Amazon’s Bedrock, which enables you to access pre-made generative AI tools via an application programming interface (API, a software bridge between two applications that enables them to communicate.
2. Pick targeted areas of your business for AI integration – Approach AI integration with return-on-investment in mind. Look for the parts of your business, such as customer interaction, where AI tools could have the biggest near-term impact. If you aren’t sure where to begin, consider how other companies in your field are using AI tools or ask experts for their advice.
3. Get backing from your most important stakeholders – Corporate leaders and other stakeholders are sometimes reluctant to jump on the AI bandwagon, citing concerns about privacy or misinformation. To get stakeholders to buy-in, you must address their concerns. For instance, they may seek assurances that human decision-makers will continue to guide your business. They also may need to understand that your company risks losing its edge to its rivals if it doesn’t stay up-to-date with AI tech developments.

About the Authors

Caroline Forsey is the manager of HubSpot’s Marketing Blog. Deepam Mishra is Amazon Web Services’ Senior Advisor to Startups.