Hey Rajaraman! Thanks to your team for having me here.
I absolutely love this question because it’s probably one of the top things on my mind 24/7. Everything about AI has largely been unknown. There’s been so much hype and noise about AI. Very low signal:noise ratio honestly. And while there have been a lot of new businesses coming up in the space, we rarely actually hear about the ones solving real problems in verticals. Here are some of the challenges I’ve seen:
- Lack of an actual problem to solve. AI is often a hammer looking for a nail. A lot of companies I’ve seen in this space, fail because they fail to use AI to solve a real issue.
- The category is non-existent and the job of the company is to create the need and change human behavior. This is a gargantuan task. And one that I’m deeply familiar with because we’ve been going at this for years at Vue.ai. I’ll get back to this in a moment. There is a huge component here that is entirely about educating the audience. It took us years of educating, engaging with the audience before we could crack them on scale. And we were acutely aware that the industry we were dealing with was largely kitted out with legacy tech.
- Helping humans who are doing these jobs get over the fear that their job will not exist in a few years. This is a very real issue. People in companies using these systems are very suspicious of AI systems and very unforgiving, as well. Often with good reason but it’s a challenge, regardless.
- Lack of understanding on RoI & emotional impact of AI on users - Our users often said things like “ya the machine failed this once when I really needed it, so we might as well do this manually”. This meant they overlooked the fact that productivity and throughput tripled when compared to non-AI based systems or manual labor but focused on the one time that they looked bad in front of their senior management.
Here are some of the things we’ve done over the years to counter some of these:
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PRODUCT MARKETING FTW:
We invested heavily in product marketing from day 0. This was perhaps one of the best things we did. Whether it was demos, FAQs, use cases, new ideas - our goal was to constantly demonstrate all the ways in which our systems could help people reimagine their work, reimagine new workflows with a 10x / order of magnitude growth in either revenue or savings on the expenses/cost side. -
CUSTOMER MARKETING FTW
We invested heavily in customer marketing from the time we were at $1M ARR. A big portion of category creation is showing that the category is being adopted by the industry, saying stories about that behavior, RoI and more. People constantly want to know what everyone else is doing. You’d be surprised but the #1 question we get on sales calls is: “What are other retailers in this space doing”. A lot of this process had to do with normalizing, familiarizing the category and making it less ‘other’, alien to their daily work. -
TEACHING THE AUDIENCE ABOUT RoI of AI
This one was huge because it helped us show people we were not there to put them out of their jobs but also help them produce 10x better work. The language took us a while to iterate and learn but eventually we realized it was not about how AI was the star of the show, it was about how the AI made those users the star of the show. -
HELPING THEM TEAM REIMAGINE THEMSELVES AS EDUCATORS NOT COOL AI PEOPLE
The early years of a startup’s journey is exciting filled with adrenaline rush and a lot of ups and downs and emotional outbursts. I can tell you when we crossed our 3 year mark, for me it was all about helping the team undo, unlearn, rethink, remake and rebuild themselves not as people building bleeding edge tech but about helping them think of themselves as people who have a responsibility to help the world around them become AI-Natives. I can tell you this is one of the best things that’s happened to the org as a whole, maybe we should have done it sooner. But the responsibility that comes with enabling people with AI is a very real one and that can help counter the fear and the high threshold for change.