Our Thoughts on AI for Innovation
It’s totally understandable. The big question around AI for leaders has to be: “How can this technology make us better, faster and more efficient?” So it’s this focus that gets the lion’s share of attention and investment. It’s logical, measurable, it delivers tangible short-term ROI — maybe! — and no-one’s going to get fired.
But it’s not the only big question.
Consider some of the things this singular focus doesn’t give you, like new revenue streams, growth bets or a radical re-imagining of “business as usual”. All the things that tomorrow’s competitors and category leaders are busy working on right now.
The other thing that’s happening, because of AI of course, is the horizon-shrinking reality that everything may change so profoundly in the next three to five years that “business as usual” becomes obsolete: those things you just optimised to perfection don’t matter any more.
The good news: what AI takes away with one digital hand, it gives back with another. AI is transforming the practice of strategic innovation. A new generation of AI research, design and prototyping tools will make innovation faster, stronger and more cost-efficient than ever.
These tools exist today: platforms like Askable, Maze, Figma Make, Cursor and many more overcome what was broken in “big innovation”.
In the time it used to take to make a strategy deck, you can research with real humans (plus synthetic users) at scale, generate hundreds more ideas and manifest concepts into multiple variants of validated high-fidelity concepts, each armed with an investment case and brand ready to pilot, go to market or deprioritise.
Let’s put some numbers on it: 10 times more market-ready innovation, in 60% less time and cost. In the hands of an experienced strategic design team like Made by Many, these tools give innovation back its teeth.
This makes it possible to invest meaningfully in both incremental optimisation and exponential transformation. The big incremental bets fund themselves while radical smaller bets provide insurance against future displacement, meaning you can bring today’s business up to the speed of AI, whilst exploring what happens next at start-up speed.
Learn more about what we're doing about this here.
