As all companies around the world rush to catch up with the right use cases that will propel them to a new era of productivity or differentiation in deploying AI (or GenAI), one thing remains a provocative reality: AI has become a new norm, a standard, a mainstream. You will find yourself being original, not to say alone, if you're claiming that you're not particularly planning to deploy any AI, and your voice will not cut through the noise if you say you are.
So here's the point: following trends and embracing the norm has never led any business to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
By essence, a competitive advantage is second to none. It is something that delivers a value that is so hard to copy. As AI become the new norm, it will never be enough to simply adopt it and expect that being standard will generate that extra level of productivity or unique value that will set a given business apart from the pack.
To achieve that, businesses need to add something else to the mix. Something that, when combined with AI will create a competitive advantage. Leaders need not just seek use cases in a vacuum or get fixated on trying to figure out how to do what they do, with AI. They need to consider where AI could improve their customer journey map and their employee journey map. This requires revisiting many unsaid assumptions about how the customer journey and the employee journey have dramatically changed over the past five years, in a post-COVID, post-ChatGPT 3 world, to truly stand out.