The Key to AI Lives Offline
When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, the general concern is that mankind has created a monster—a mythical beast compelling those who have seen its true power to whisper the same warning: “You have no idea what’s coming.” Investors, business leaders, and even academics are all foaming at the mouth, hoping to harness this power to cut costs if not jobs. Then you have AI influencers claiming that this technology will soon be able to solve all major business problems, if you “throw a bunch of compute at it.” But we’re already capable of using AI to solve the biggest (and most basic) business problems leaders continue to face. The trouble is, hardly anyone knows how to train their dragon.
Imagine every business is its own unique realm. A world within a world. Each world has a unique purpose, culture, people, and psychology. And thanks to AI, every world can now have its own dragon, if they know how to use it. Train it correctly, and you can have the amazing power everyone dreams of when they discuss AI. Fail to train it and you’ll likely end up scorched by shallow insights that are doomed to fail.
Here’s what most business leaders are missing: the beauty of constraints. If you expect AI to determine your best product, your best hires, your best marketing strategy, and your best business model, then you can’t continue to feed it all the data of the Internet hoping it will intuitively solve for X. There’s too much noise for a clear signal. That didn’t work for search; it doesn’t work for AI. That’s why you need to confine AI to the realm of your specific business—the world in which your offer lives and the unique qualities that define it. And, at least at Stealth Dog Labs, that information lives offline.
No business would want to be viewed as generic, so why are we treating it that way when it comes to AI? Why do we hope the solution to our business problems is to throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks? No, the best way to use AI is to spend 50 minutes thinking about the problem, then 10 minutes working on the solution. Ignore the talking heads who claim AI will magically solve all of your problems without forcing you to think—or worse, enable you to fire everyone as a cost-saving measure. Instead, get back to the basics of business, then filter your tech stack through those offline insights to find new hires, new customers, and new opportunities.
To be clear, AI can be an extremely powerful tool for any business operation, and those who learn how to wield that power will surely have an advantage in the months and years ahead. However, to fully take advantage of this technology, you will need to identity your driving purpose, separate noise from signal, and commit to doing the human part well. Only then can the AI beast do what it does best: present an eloquent solution based only on the data you’ve fed it—not all of the data ever created in the history of the world.
There is a method to this madness, and it’s nothing new—but it could be the deciding factor between complete domination of your industry and the destruction of what you’ve previously built. Because when it comes to our biggest problems in business, artificial solutions simply won’t do, despite the hype that it’s all you’ll ever need.
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