The use of AI in product development is revolutionizing the way companies drive innovation and respond to user needs. In the face of these massive changes, today's technology leaders must ensure that their efforts have a real impact and are not just empty words.
A solid foundation consists of a clear understanding of customer needs, market dynamics and the technology landscape. This requires a balanced mix of user-centricity, deliberately limiting AI optimization to relevant areas, and ensuring that the underlying requirements and processes are ready for the integration of AI tools. In this way, organizations can create innovative, sustainable and user-friendly solutions that unlock the true value of AI in product innovation.
VP of Engineering at Box.
Focus on your users
AI is all the rage right now, but unlike recent hype cycles, the natural language and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have the potential for broad impact across a wide range of products. But adding AI to a well-functioning product just for the sake of being on-trend only confuses users.
Before implementing AI, companies should ask themselves whether AI actually addresses problems or gaps. User evaluation is key. How can AI improve the employee experience without losing sight of the product strategy? Interactions that would benefit from a natural language interface, or manual workflows that could be streamlined, may also be important.
A familiar example: when searching the online platform AirBnB, users filter options based on criteria like price or number of bedrooms. Simply replacing a straightforward filter with users typing a natural language question doesn’t unlock new capabilities and creates a more cumbersome flow with a higher risk of unexpected results. Still, even with multiple filters, it’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for. Modeling the long tail of personal criteria as effective filters is difficult. The ability of AI to understand the nuances of natural language can make all the difference. With AI-powered search, there are no limits to personalization. At the same time, fast, meaningful and functional filters should not be sacrificed.
While it is relatively easy to create a compelling demo with new AI technologies, it is challenging to develop a useful product. Building a step-by-step process allows you to learn from user feedback and is critical to creating a valuable and compelling experience.
Beware of premature fine-tuning!
One of the exciting facets of this latest wave of AI is its ability to be hyper customized. What used to require human-level comprehension of nuance and intent, can now be digitized and made accessible at scale.
The fascination with the technology should not get in the way of knowing everything about practical product development. While fine-tuning a bespoke model might seem enticing, it’s a form of premature optimization that locks in a set of choices before the correct product fit is found. Fine-tuning an AI model prematurely slows down the rate of iteration and increases the maintenance costs, ultimately hindering innovation velocity.
So how do you create a custom experience? It’s all about the prompt. The prompt is a great place to set the tone for the interaction — confidence, cultural or industry adjustments, the brand voice, and more. It should communicate any proprietary information that the model should use. The prompt should also summarize the context that needs to be provided to new employees to complete the task.
This approach provides the flexibility to incrementally improve and adapt as both the underlying technology and the understanding of how to use it evolve. The degree of sophistication in structuring the task is ultimately a key differentiator for a product. AI models are like black boxes - a query leads to an answer. Even small changes can lead to massive changes in quality. Early implementation of a quality assurance process allows for effective evaluation of improvements and rapid detection of deterioration.
The foundation for rapid innovation
To keep up with the pace of change in AI, a team needs to be able to evolve quickly. A solid foundation starts with building an AI platform that paves the way for developers and enables both rapid iterations and consistency across the product. Consideration should also be given to standardizing on approved vendors and models, a basic query framework, an approach to quality testing, and basic patterns and functions for extracting relevant data from common data sources to serve as context in the query.
While there can be many challenges in simplifying an AI platform, there should not be too much focus on centralization. It's not about the technology, it's about how it's integrated into the product. Teams responsible for a specific aspect of a product are best placed to identify and optimise appropriate use cases. Therefore, all members of a product development team should be able to use AI successfully in their respective areas.
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