Fail Fast, Find Gold— With AI

#AI will enable #innovative companies.... FAIL more! Wait, does that sound right to you? Well, it is..

IF companies can tolerate a higher level of failure, #AI will help them #grow faster!

If not, the use of AI will be limited to cost efficiencies and productivity improvements.

We all see how GenAI improves productivity. CEOs are quickly realising how they can be more competitive through AI implementation.

In Innovation, the use of AI is also accelerating. The Bain & Company Innovation Report 2025 says that the fastest-growing companies are using AI in 40-75% of their Innovation steps, accelerating to >90% in the next few years.

Not surprising. AI helps humans work through ideas more easily, incredibly faster and at lower cost.

But while some CEO's will expect that such efficiency should improve success rate, the thing about innovation is that it's incredibly difficult to know what is a "Big Idea" or an idea that will work, before it's actually tested with customers.

(Ask me. When I was in #AdityaBirlaGroup, we launched a " Company loyalty card" that allowed our millions of B2B customers and thousands of employees get benefits by shopping in our B2C stores. We thought it was a big idea and would contribute to growth. We launched it with fanfare and executed the programme well.

It didn't work. Usage was neither wide enough nor often enough. Some customers raved about it & the metrics climb slowly in the beginning... that made us stay with it longer than we should have, instead of acknowledging failure and moving on quickly.

Truth is, we hated to tell ourselves or the company that it (we) had failed.)

Sounds familiar?

Fortunately, we closed it and tried many other ideas, some of which were home runs.

With AI, companies can test more new ideas more often, more cost-effectively. That increases failure rates. But it also enables you to find gold nuggets and take them ahead, step-by-step thru the innovation process, faster. Concept development and testing that could cost tens of thousands of dollars can be done in less than a hundred. Customer research which would take weeks or months can be done in days.

So will your employee use AI just to get that one idea he had, to somehow work? (Because if he says it didn't work, he may get penalised by the organisation?)

Or will you truly encourage her to fail more, and faster, knowing that that's part of the way she and the team will ultimately find "the big one"?... because you know that, like you, she herself is wired "not-to-fail"?

Can you ask, at your monthly review, "Hey, how many ideas did you try this month that did NOT work?" And celebrate/ give recognition when the score is higher?

AI is a powerful tool for innovation! The real stumbling block is the human...are we willing to take so many failures, so fast?

#AI #GenAI #Innovation #Leadership #CEOs #BusinessGrowth #FutureOfWork #DigitalTransformation #Strategy #Chairman #BoardLeadership #FailFast #GrowthMindset