A vertical AI strategy makes good business sense.
Digital assistants are here to stay, and no one will be able to outcompete the top tech companies in the world when it comes to delivering horizontal value at scale.
The good news is that these same giants, the likes of Google, Amazon and Tencent, are building the world’s AI infrastructure, and making it available for your business to leverage in your own AI initiatives.
These building blocks — chips, cloud platforms, algorithms, enterprise and industry solutions — are now available to reduce effort, friction and time to market. Yet, as you consider leveraging these “plug and play” algorithms, you must assess the implications for your business.
Unlike standard software, an AI algorithm learns from the data it processes. Over time, deep learning algorithms uncover the domain rules that may be a core competitive advantage. The code might be learning to answer the questions that, for now, only your business can answer.
“The value of code is different from data, but what about the value of the model that code improves based on that data?” — Shivon Zilis. Neuralink, OpenAI, and Tesla.
If businesses are looking to leverage face recognition technology, using an existing API makes good business sense, in most cases, this functionality is a commodity that is not part of a business’ unique value proposition. But as we consider leveraging specialised industry solutions, we must ask ourselves, who owns the algorithm? Who else will benefit from the proprietary data we are feeding it? Are you giving away your IP? When it comes to AI, strategy matters.
The best way for most businesses to remain competitive is to adopt a vertical AI strategy leveraging the proprietary and specialised data they have acquired, codifying their domain expertise, and building full-stack products and services.
Despite the best efforts, many bots released over the past few years have failed to garner mainstream adoption. The lack of hyper-relevant, connected customer experiences across the entire user journey will make or break a business ability to unlock the value of a vertical AI strategy.
Soon most businesses will be connected to digital assistants. Google, Alexa and others will shift from task to goal orientation; they will help plan an entire project instead of just setting a reminder.
B2B and B2C ecosystems are emerging, and participation in them will be imperative if a business is looking to survive and thrive. At a minimum, companies must act now to remain discoverable as voice replaces the screen as the principal channel for online search.
In the business of Artificial Intelligence some things remain nonnegotiable — transparency, consent, accountability, inclusion and fairness — are just a few of the experience principles that must inform our approach.
Businesses must place customer experience at the centre of their strategy, and trust at the centre of their customer experience.
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