AI is not Intel Inside

Intel Inside was a stroke of co-marketing genius. The computer makers needed chips. Intel needed to sell them. The public wanted good computers without having to know what that really meant.

If you saw Intel Inside, you knew you had a decent computer.

AI ain’t no Intel. So, AI is not something to splash around your packaging or your messaging in the hopes of making people automatically associate your product with The Best.

It seems to be the opposite.

In an unscientific study barely conducted by me, B2B software buyers are more interested in A) what a product can do for them, and B) that said product isn’t going to steal their data and lie to them.

AI has become a bit of a bogeyman when it’s put front and center. It’s almost as if people are wary of products that don’t have anything else to talk about. “Yeah, but we have AI” means exactly nothing because AI means almost anything right now.

So where to from here?

Back to the basics. Products built to solve problems get attention. How they solve the problem is a secondary concern. Should we all build with AI Inside? Yes, but we need to be careful about its role and we need to be careful about how we talk about what it does in our products.

Adding an AI feature is a sugar hit. Just like many releases and launches. It may give you a quick bump in website traffic and demos, but it is not the answer to your growth problems.

Build with it. Make sure it adds value and respects data. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s the one feature everyone has been waiting for you to release.

Peter

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