Dr. Andrea C Johnson, CIO, Pipedrive, says when engineering new AI into solutions, bear in mind the second-order impact on users.
Marc Andreessen’s wildly popular article and origin of the famous phrase “software is eating the world”, shared the view that software would grow to engulf all sectors, shake up every industry, and change the world. It was a prescient view in 2011 and it has come true in spades.
SaaS firms have won the battle for hearts and minds. Where legacy businesses did not catch up in time, whole sectors – from banking to taxis – were disrupted by nimble SaaS start-ups offering greater convenience and speed.
At the same time, every paradigm shift creates something of a bubble, with winners and losers, before the technologies and business models all shake out and a new balance is achieved. It can be challenging to understand the right strategy at first.
One path through these shifts, such as with AI, particularly GenAI, is to ensure the digital transformation journey is firmly oriented to solving user challenges within the organisation’s unique business and social environment. With customer focus top of mind, remain open to all possible paths to the destination. So, the goal should not be ‘win with AI’, but to build a business that will thrive over the next decade.
Don’t wait – iterate
Technology is transformational, and those that act first have longer to make their journey a success. Yet with GenAI rapidly advancing, many organisations will want to know they have the best tools in place and avoid risks from potentially insecure, non-compliant, or just poorly performing tools.
Sandboxing, deploying internal tools or being open with customers where offered services are beta, are viable paths. But before these steps, an organisation should have a set of principles and a roadmap to plan how it will move at the right pace. Proper planning starts the journey leading to competitive advantage. Yet the risk of moving too slowly is often top of mind as AI products gain fame and consumers become more familiar and accepting.
There are automation and intelligent AI workflows for IT, financial operations, sales, marketing and customer support that can be started with low risk. They can run in parallel with existing systems to test and evaluate. These can immediately help free up humans to add more value to customer-facing interactions.
Chatbots and agents help guide customers through the contact process and are becoming very smart. Indeed, customers are coming to expect and enjoy these tools – if they work as promised. Many queries fall into broad types. With the right large language models supporting customers, most natural language queries can be answered instantly. This saves staff for the creative, challenging requests where empathy and humanity matter.
There are AI tools that don’t require any integration, such as those that support improved writing, for the sales and marketing team in particular, or document understanding tools to help digest pages of information to quickly find an answer. These solutions provide limited and testable outputs. They speed up actions which take humans a long time or careful checking. Tasks like dictation, transcription, and calculations aren’t fun for people to do, but important to get right.
Many of these solutions are being built into the SaaS solutions used by other providers, like CRM, revenue platforms, or ERP. Software providers gain economies as they upgrade the solutions they use, providing business benefits that can often translate to improved customer service.
Avoid the hype, find the real need
Expertise is important and to get the most from new technologies raising levels of data literacy and systems knowledge throughout the organisation will ensure that users can better judge AI outputs and suitability.
It is worth exploring team creativity and ideation. Colleagues may have insights on the tweaks, quick wins or strategic projects that could help them leverage AI for efficiency and productivity. A hackathon might be a great way to get teams across the business to solve problems together. In a hackathon teams will compete to achieve a specific business goal and develop new ideas to put into practice. They also come with other benefits beyond solving business problems, increasing teamwork, exposing teammates to new ideas and colleagues and growing their skills and knowledge.
AI in your own offering
This is the most exciting part of the SaaS business. Stay fully driven by customer needs. Consistently successful leaders want to be known for the quality of their offerings rather than their ambition.
Consider the AI element. Is the most useful form factor an AI-powered assistant – front and centre to the experience, or a helpful element of the back end? A sales and marketing solution could use an AI-powered assistant bot to offer user tips. At the backend AI could automatically match leads in the sales pipeline with new offers, setting up the interaction for a human to review and finesse.
Will you build a new offering to showcase a new AI ability or work it into an existing solution? Weigh up the pros and cons – whilst considering that a platform approach may create the best way to solve many customer challenges over a longer term.
When engineering new AI into solutions, bear in mind the second-order impact on users. If the offering will disrupt user workflows or experiences, it’s right to be upfront and ensure user testing and feedback inform marketing and sales conversations.
In a changing paradigm you don’t want to be the business that implements a great idea spectacularly wrong by misjudging its social impact.
