Industry
High Tech
High Tech Solutions to Drive Business Transformation through Technology
Highlights
- Generative AI will enable software product organizations to expand into new markets, create product differentiation, and stay ahead of competition.
- Reimagined and optimized IT processes using AI will help reduce costs and elevate customer experience for such enterprises.
- Product-oriented organizations must evaluate the benefits of generative AI, the effort of implementation, and take individual readiness into consideration.
Pioneering smarter products
Software product organizations are uniquely positioned to explore the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) while building and enhancing AI itself.
Software product organizations need to focus on making context-aware, significantly changing the way software products are developed, deployed, and operated. Generative AI (GenAI) can:
- Enhance product experience with intuitive and intelligent conversations.
- Improve efficiency with increased accuracy due to advanced models trained on extensive data.
- Utilize advanced computing to comprehend and simulate creative intelligence.
GenAI integrates context into design by providing the most appropriate solution for a challenging task, making software more intelligent and meaningful for the user. Software product enterprises must use GenAI to build compelling experiences for their customers.
GenAI offers a new level of innovation and transformation, enabling companies to reach new horizons and redefine the marketplace through:
- Development: GenAI can reimagine the software product lifecycle by helping with the right market research and feature definition, while prioritizing product architecture, design, development, build, quality, and deployment.
- Maintenance: It can reduce the maintenance effort and enhance product quality with predictive, preventive, and self-healing capabilities.
- Support: GenAI can reduce manual support requirements by generating the next-best course of action and providing real-time solutions and demos for end-users and maintenance personnel.
- IT and corporate functions: AI systems create possibilities to reimagine and transform IT processes to enhance customer experience, improve productivity, increase efficiency, and enhance product security. The product support process will see significant change with intelligent conversion with customers.
- Professional services: Fast track customer-specific implementations, deployment, configuration, and customization with GenAI models pre-trained on the inner workings of products.
- Experience: The software industry is exploring every possibility of building intelligence into products. GenAI assimilates information, analyzes data, responds by anticipating the next best course of action, eliminates repetitive tasks, and transforms customer experience by allowing activities, workflows, and input forms to be completed intuitively.
- Intelligent insights: Provide meaningful insights with advancements in predictive capabilities, detection, classification, tagging, and efficient and scalable processing.
- Add-on features and capabilities: Current products can be enhanced with a new set of features based on advancements in intelligent conversations, and predictive, generative capabilities.
- Future possibilities: GenAI creates the possibility of launching new products for everyday use. It enhances productivity, assists in decision-making, and ensures continuous creativity. These products can help with both business and personal tasks.
Some challenges along the way
Although GenAI has enormous potential and possibilities, it also comes with implementation challenges.
With this technology evolving rapidly, organizations must figure out their priorities, align resources, and forge new partnerships to be competitive in creation and adoption. To do so, enterprises must:
- Encourage an AI-led ecosystem: Product engineering organizations need to focus on creating an AI-led ecosystem that will assist, transform, and automate processes as necessary.
- Mitigate risks in data security and privacy: Enterprises must implement strong data governance and add access controls and guardrails to address privacy and security concerns. This will protect personal data, review it for regulatory compliance, eliminate biases, and ensure adherence to standards.
- Build responsible AI: Mature and responsible AI practices must be ingrained into the product lifecycle to manage and continuously test for unbiased outcomes, hallucination, misinformation, inappropriate material, and ownership issues.
- Ensure end-user readiness: Assess the readiness of end users and existing IT systems in place to enable an AI-led ecosystem.
Making the GenAI dream come true
To optimize GenAI, it is imperative that an organization sets priorities based on its key goals and the broader growth roadmap.
Product-oriented organizations must concentrate on six critical dimensions to approach GenAI possibilities for the company to maximize benefits, increase market share, and gain a competitive edge in the industry (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Essential dimensions to tap into GenAI possibilities
Figure 1
Product engineering organizations need to navigate complex decision-making processes to prioritize the following possibilities of a GenAI-integrated ecosystem:
- Creation and customization of new tech: Focus on creating and customizing AI technology to suit a customer's specific needs by building, refining, and personalizing AI models. With the use of contextualized sources, including data, and fine-tuned models, the company can develop industry context-aware models, enhance its capabilities, and explore various opportunities.
- Unlocking new revenue streams: The creation and launch of new products and services will lead to market expansion and new revenue streams. New products can be launched in the form of contextual copilots which address industry specific tasks, and data marts to monetize the data used for training AI models like application marketplaces and more.
- Enhancing existing products with GenAI: Companies can look at infusing and integrating GenAI into their current products to deliver greater value to customers and differentiate themselves in the market. These enhancements include intelligent conversations, real-time content generation (such as educational products) to enhance engagements, intelligent workflow and decision-making, productivity gains, and intelligent insights with advancements in predictive capabilities (for instance, in security products).
- Reimagining the product development lifecycle: By redefining current product development methods, companies can significantly accelerate their product development, deployment, and launch processes. Utilizing GenAI, enterprises can accelerate feature specification, feature prioritization, code and script development, and testing and validation while enabling seamless deployment and automation in product sustenance and support.
- Consistent customer experience: Enterprises must evaluate all the customer touchpoints and how GenAI can bring intelligence and intuitiveness to improve customer experience. New avenues of interactions, predicting the next best actions and getting deep insights from the product can help reimagine how products and services around products are designed.
- Optimized operations: Product-oriented organizations must explore possibilities of productivity gains and optimization across the value chain, including product lifecycle, deployment, support, professional services, sales, marketing, after-market support, order to cash, and other IT processes. This will help accelerate the launch, reduce costs, and improve customer experience and satisfaction.
A vision for the road ahead
With GenAI, products and services will evolve to meet changing customer expectations while enhancing quality and enabling faster innovation and product launches.
Future-ready with AI: Enterprises must begin their AI journey with high-impact initiatives to reimagine market segments, product lines, business models, and revenue streams.
Customer-centric value: AI will be a significant catalyst in driving customer value and endless possibilities. In an intensely competitive and fast-moving market, it is vital to think customer-first, prioritizing initiatives based on market relevance and a deep understanding of customer pain points and unstated needs. Enterprises should consider setting up a lab and core team to research, validate, and prioritize AI-forward innovation.
Productivity and employee experience: Enterprises must set this as one of the strategic focus areas for AI implementation, transforming productivity, efficiency, and employee experience.
Organizational readiness: It is vital to assess an organization’s AI maturity, develop talent skilled in the technology, and imbibe and promote an AI culture that embraces innovation. This depends on strong AI governance, which is critical to successfully establishing sustainable AI initiatives. Enterprises must evaluate the benefits of investing in AI infrastructure and technology, establishing innovation labs, and ensuring market readiness.
Building strategic partnerships: Organizations must identify and develop a partner ecosystem in this AI journey, which will help accelerate their journey, create innovation possibilities, and develop and deliver value to customers. Enterprises must build partnerships for infrastructure, technology, talent, and market expansions.
