In 2001, Steve Jobs called it as big a deal as the PC and venture capitalist John Doerr said it might be bigger than the internet. What revolutionary technology were they referring to? The Segway. You know, the personal transport device that flopped in the marketplace and became synonymous with mall security guards.
The fanfare around artificial intelligence (AI) today is even bigger than the lofty talk about the Segway over twenty years ago. I have no doubt that in the long run AI will live up to the hype and revolutionize our lives and work. But in the short run, we risk building an astonishing, awe-inspiring technology that few use.
The speed of development and untapped potential around AI are astounding, but that doesn’t mean AI will automatically become central to our lives and work. Just look at Apple’s Vision Pro as a tale of a brilliant piece of technology that the world is still trying to wrap its mind around.
If we remain solely focused on just building better and better AI capabilities, we risk creating an amazing technology without clear applications, public acceptance, or concrete returns for businesses. Instead, we need to focus on developing a culture of innovation around AI that shapes the technology with society and business front and center. Innovation is what will make companies successful in an AI-driven future.
Society and business top of mind
Technology alone does not transform how we live and work. Instead, it needs to be coupled with innovation. Electricity was a major technological breakthrough, but it was that technology coupled with innovation in the form of things like the lightbulb, home appliances, and electric motors to run machines, that was transformative.
What is the difference between a technological development and an innovation? Both create something new or reimagine something existing and most provide value or positive impact. The real difference is innovations are also desirable to users, feasible with current technology, and viable in the marketplace. In other words, innovations keep society and the market top of mind; they have clear applications that enhance users’ experience, making people want to embrace the technology.
AI developers need to prioritize innovation, designing with adoption and use at the forefront. Fundamentally, AI needs to create a better experience for people or we risk creating technological developments without widespread use or acceptance.
Culture of innovation
Companies can absolutely foster a culture of innovation where new technology, including AI, is built with a focus on clear uses and real value. In an enterprise, we can foster this culture in clear and concrete ways. First, start by defining an end goal for your entire organization that puts innovation at the center. This can be your people’s north star as they work.
Once you have defined a vision for innovation, you can then create the building blocks for innovation within your enterprise centered around collaboration and communication; creativity and risk-taking; and concrete actions.
Collaboration and communication
Innovation needs open communication and collaboration. Foster an environment in your company where ideas can be freely shared, and everyone feels empowered to contribute without fear of judgment or hierarchy. Promote cross-functional, diverse, and inclusive collaboration, as varied perspectives often lead to breakthrough ideas. Encourage teams to work together, share knowledge, and learn from one another.
Creativity and risk-taking
As your employees work together, also provide them with the space to experiment. Give employees autonomy and decision-making authority to explore and implement their innovative ideas. Encourage calculated risk-taking and learn from both successes and failures. Celebrate and reward innovative efforts, even if they don’t always lead to immediate success. Promote a learning mindset and provide opportunities for ongoing education and skill development.
Concrete actions
Finally, back up this employee culture with your own actions. Provide your employees with the necessary tools and support to turn their ideas into reality. This means allocating resources, including time, budget, and technology, to support innovative initiatives. Invest in research and development, provide training programs, and create dedicated spaces for experimentation.
Demonstrate your commitment to innovation by actively participating in the process. Encourage leaders at all levels to engage in innovative thinking, take ownership of their ideas, and support their teams’ initiatives. When you lead by example through words and actions, your employees will follow and an innovation culture will thrive.
AI: innovation assistant
The exciting thing about AI is that it can actually help you take advantage of your culture of innovation within your enterprise. AI can analyze systems, processes, and even problems, and suggest areas for improvement. These areas for improvement can become the focus of your organization’s innovation efforts. Innovations often begin when we have clear problems to solve.
AI can even suggest solutions and your teams can help create the innovations that carry out those solutions. For example, a business could ask AI to help identify what single solution would reduce downtime the most on their production line. AI might identify decreasing component failure as the biggest area for improvement. You could then ask AI how you might create that component better so it would be less likely to fail. The end result would be an innovation—a reimagined component that will improve the production experience—made possible by the company’s culture and AI.
A revolution in intelligence and society
We’re now living through the early stages of an intelligence revolution where artificial intelligence will soon far exceed human intelligence by several orders of magnitude. The intelligence revolution is going to change everything going forward.
But how quickly and successfully the intelligence revolution transforms how we live and work will not be simply because of the power of the technology; it will be because of innovation. Great technology cannot transform society if it isn’t being used. People—consumers, employees, and enterprises included—using AI on a daily basis will be the conduit for the AI revolution.
To take AI to the next level, we need people and forward-thinking enterprises to prioritize innovation. For example, with products like Dall-E or Midjourney, we can graphically produce anything we want. But if we keep giving the same prompts confined to our current ways of thinking, then we will just get new images of things and ideas that already exist. If we keep asking AI to draw a cat, it will just draw a cat.
It is people applying AI technology in innovative ways—creating graphics that are novel for new applications, or designing new AI products and services that enhance experience—that will take AI to the next level.
We are in exciting times. Not everyone gets to live through the actual birth and execution of a revolution on the scale of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. If we focus on innovation, I believe AI will live up to the hype, transforming both work and society in countless ways.
