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How do you gauge your company’s progress toward meeting the needs of AI natives?
Where does your company stand now, and how can you improve your odds of success?
What factors affect your rate of progress?
As you consider these questions, you’ll want to understand the important dynamics, timelines, and benchmarks.
You’ll also want to assess your company’s readiness for change. AI modernization might well be the biggest cultural and organizational change your company will undergo. We recommend laying the groundwork with a few basic actions.
Action 1: Start with Experience
Think of experience, not features.
Program features, while important, can mire a company in the digital past. To move your company forward, consider how AI can create experiences that draw people deeper into your brand.
Start by rethinking your products and services from the foundation. Unleash yourself from the shackles of the past and consider your actions from the perspective of the AI native.
Action 2: Edit out the cognitive friction
Your primary competition for the AI native isn’t your current competitors, startups, or Google—it’s all the things that demand your customer’s attention.
Understand that simplicity, better UI, or better onboarding isn’t enough. You must find ways to reduce cognitive friction in your customers’ lives.
The old technological paradigm was about choice. But although advances brought more choices, they also brought decision fatigue. AI natives expect companies to reduce the scope of choice in a way that makes sense for them.
They want you to think for them. So do it.
Action 3: Double down on transparency
Like all consumers, AI natives expect you to leverage this technology ethically. But they also understand that the two way relationship with AI creates unavoidable new risks and potential downsides.
Too many companies react to these risks with debate and paralysis. Instead of being paralyzed by fear of what could go wrong, double down on transparency.
Tell customers how you use their data, how you build your models, and how you make money. The perceived risk of AI decreases with communication and transparency. Just tell them the truth.
Action 4: Create stickiness through model training
AI natives gravitate to products that slowly get better with use. They don’t expect—or even want—a product to instantly work perfectly. They are very willing invest time in model training as long as it doesn’t increase their cognitive load.
Empower them to train models through experience, and your product becomes their product. You’ll have them forever.
A Simple First Step
Most of your peers will read this report and find it convincing. And then they’ll do . . . nothing. How about you? The biggest mistake you can make is waiting for clear proof of the AI native’s preferences. That kind of surety only happens in hindsight, and by then we’ll already know the winners and losers.
We’ve provided four general action paths, but you need a plan to get your company behind them.
Here are two suggestions:
- Create an AI natives strategy team. Choose 3 to 5 of your best data scientists and product people. Send them to an offsite retreat for two days. Ask them to reimagine your core product for the AI native. We can provide you a facilitator if you need one.
- AI natives assessment. If you prefer an outsider’s perspective, Prolego can perform an AI natives assessment for you. We will capture the ideas of your best people and combine them with our expertise with AI technology and AI natives.
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