Beyond Human Capacity
The most important thing to remember about AI is that it operates at a scale beyond human capacity. Using it to replace people can therefore sell the technology short. Using it to amplify human judgement is the path to greater prosperity.
A Gallup study from last month found that search was neck and neck with writing and editing as the most common use of AI at work. Done well, search at scale opens up new opportunities. Done poorly, it wastes time and money.
AI will generate and screen opportunities at tremendous scale. It will not test products, expand customer budgets, develop production and distribution capabilities, or anticipate competitor responses. Which leaves the strategic decisions to humans.
How to Expand
Business expansion takes place on five levels:
The message – AI tries out millions of combinations of proof points, customer segments and stages of the buyer’s journey.
The product – AI monitors customer wins, losses and interactions to identify unmet needs and product modifications.
The account – AI connects evidence from scattered sources to find renewal and expansion opportunities in accounts that receive little sales attention.
The customer group - AI undertakes pattern recognition across unconventional dimensions to uncover overlooked groups with a shared need.
The market – AI matches a company’s capabilities with challenges in other industries to find new uses for existing products, skills and equipment.
Together, these answer the five core expansion questions.
How to sell – combinatorial advertising
What to sell – observing product demand
What else to sell – mapping account opportunities
Who else to sell to – overlooked customer segments
Where else to compete – discovering adjacent markets
Each exploits a particular AI advantage over humans. These are generating and evaluating combinations, interpreting unstructured information, connecting disconnected evidence, detecting unexpected patterns and transferring knowledge between domains.
But finding more opportunities only creates value if the business can afford to test and exploit them.
The Validation Problem
When I talk through these options with SME owners, it is mapping opportunities for every customer that resonates most. Almost every business has neglected accounts, scattered information and capabilities that existing clients do not know about.
A salesperson can stay on top of around 20 accounts. The good ones have expansion plans for each. AI can review every account whenever new information arises. That is operating beyond human scale.
Every email, sales call, support ticket, product review, return and lost quotation contains unstructured information. Understanding that information and using it to propose new products and service bundles is the most straightforward form of expansion. Selling into a warm customer base.
Contrast that with another option that at first seems appealing. Advertising involves a jumble of customer problems, product benefits, industry segments, locations and buying stages. They respond to different headlines, images, offers, proof points and channels.
AI can create millions of theoretical combinations. A business cannot afford to test them all with real customers. The value lies in screening those combinations and selecting the most promising few hundred for actual testing.
Most SMEs don’t have the reach to justify the expense of testing dozens of different adverts, let alone hundreds or thousands. You will not learn anything from a message sent to a tiny sample of potential buyers. Chance will play a large part in the results. Tracking the data generated by multiple campaigns could also become a headache.
If you have a meaningful advertising budget, AI has a role to play. If not, then mapping the opportunity for upselling to existing accounts is the more likely win.
Beyond Search at Scale
Commercial search at scale finds opportunities that humans could not examine. It makes exploration cheap but does little to change the economics of validation.
It can identify unusual candidates, assemble the supporting evidence and eliminate the obvious failures. It cannot change the economics of production and distribution or make customers buy. Humans still have a critical role in choosing what goes live and delivering the outcome.
There are other applications that can manage customers, assets, decisions and operations with a level of attention humans could never sustain. That is where AI starts to reorganise how a business works. We will explore them over the coming weeks.
Questions to Ask and Answer
Where could AI uncover opportunities we currently miss?
Where would AI give every customer more attention?
Which opportunities can we afford to test?