Consider your core
It is the one skill, process or advantage you have over your competition. Then think of all the things you do to surround that core with people and assets that complete the company and allow you to release your product or perform your service. Don’t diminish the effectiveness of AI in your decision. We’ll discuss that next below.
Now consider how many of those surrounding assets and services are necessary for you to perform to protect and grow your core. There are lots of wheels spinning around the core that take up the attention and resources of management but add little or no value to the core of the business.
So, what’s new about this?
These are new times, enhanced by our global ability to find resources anywhere on earth to complement the core of our business. And most often, the companies supplying those services are much more efficient at doing so than we could be because of their experience and advantages of scale, and the cost to us of such services is lower than performing them ourselves.
[Email readers continue here…] And now we have the resources (and challenges) of artificial intelligence to quickly aid your competitors in developing their strengths, creating code automatically, publishing articles, developing concepts, and even directing marketing efforts. There has never been a time in recent history when our unique ideas and skills have been more challenged.
Sense of urgency
Does all of this create a new or renewed sense of urgency for you to get moving, to get to market with a minimum viable product, to stake your ground as a leader or early provider? The only conclusion must be that we are in a period when entrepreneurs and managers either take advantage of the new tools or are left in the dust. If you still are not a believer, try asking ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity to present you with a marketing plan for your business with steps toward accomplishment of the plan. Or if you are a program coder, ask one of these to generate useful code in whatever language you prefer, then test the code. If you are a photographer, ask one of the many online services using AI to change the background, sharpen the picture, or modify the image you’ve created. You get the idea. Urgency!
So – what is your core offering? Are you building it more slowly because your resources and attention are focused on many processes not critical to that core? Are you considering sharpening your vision of your core offering using these new tools? If you are not experimenting, using, releasing products or services with the help of these AI co-pilots to focus and aid you in your efforts, consider this your wakeup call!
Images created with DALL-E3 using prompt: “Robot in semi-human form working beside a realistic image of a young entrepreneur at desk examining a document with a periwinkle blue background surrounded by a white border.”
