Introduction

Okay, I think Jack's done a great job of introducing me.

I'm going to be talking about something which might seem a little dull or a little bit common sense, but one thing that I've come to learn over the years is that technology and technology strategy and business strategy, sometimes they get a little bit confused.

So let's go and explore. Laura.

AI Is Not a Business Strategy

AI is not a business strategy.

Technology Hype Cycles and What They Teach Us

From Dot-com to Blockchain to AI

Now, the first thing I want to do is I'm going to do that annoying thing where I ask, who here is younger than 40? Okay, good, good.

Because the first question that I'm going to ask, well, there we go.

Who remembers the dot -com boom back in 1999? 99. Good.

The people who are younger than 40, sometimes I mention this and they look at me a little bit, you know, kind of confused as to what this was.

Who remembers blockchain? Any blockchain? Yep. Yep.

How about web 2 .0, SAS, cloud -based computing? Yep. So

So where I kind of see things at the moment is we've had all of these transformational technologies come through in the past, and I'm not putting any kind of judgment on any of these transformational technologies, because in their own way, they all have been transformational, and now we're seeing another one, which is AI.

And every time that we had one of these big transformational technologies sort of come come through out of nowhere. And for me, this has been going on before the dot -com boom.

It's just that before the dot -com boom, I probably wasn't old enough to really think about these or see them.

My dad used to tell me about when the transistor came in. So this is just another one of these cycles.

Now, what I observed in each of these times when one of these transformational technologies came in is um everybody kind of climbs aboard the hype train and um and all of a sudden every pitch whether it's a startup founder coming to um movac or myself um a pitch to the board uh it could be a pitch from um management to the ceo doesn't matter uh blockchain was a really a good example of this.

When blockchain kind of first came to our awareness, everybody had to put blockchain in their pitch. On Adminis, the company that I founded, the board, when we were trying to raise capital, were saying, okay, where are you going to put blockchain in your pitch?

And it was almost like there was intense pressure for blockchain to become our business rather than what our business actually was so a lot of companies not every company but um in climbing aboard this hype train some companies ended up changing their narrative about what their business actually was about and i'm starting to see this again with with ai again it's not any kind of judgment on ai it's just that you see many companies who might not otherwise be seen as AI coming out saying, we are AI, everything we do is AI.

After a while, eventually, reality kind of set in. And there's a saying, when the tide goes out, you get to see who's wearing swimming trunks. And so it was with, say, the dot -com boom. That was a classic example.

You had all these companies that were rushing to put dot -com on the back of their name. They didn't have very good business models. They didn't really have a value proposition for their customers. They didn't know what their business was actually about. They were just jumping on the hype train.

The companies that actually survived and thrived were the ones that knew what their value proposition was. Those who hitched onto the hype train du jour, because it could have been blockchain, chain, web 2 .0, SaaS, they didn't always survive and thrive.

Start With Your Value Proposition

So one thing I'd like to say is to think about what you're focusing on. And the first thing I always say to companies that I talk to, whether I'm providing mentoring

or giving them advice for a startup pitch,

is know yourself, know thyself, right? What are you? What is your business actually about?

What are you actually going to do? How do you deliver value to your customers?

What are you actually going to do? How do you deliver value to your customers?

What's your competitive advantage, right? I haven't even gone anywhere with AI yet, right?

What I want is for companies to actually realize what they're in the business of.

If you're in the business of selling cookies, right it's if you come out and say we're an ai cookie business yeah

what is your product or service now there are some companies that genuinely are selling ai and and that's fine but at least know what it is that you're selling know what your customer is know what your customer wants or are you using ai to as an enabler to help you deliver better

or outcomes for your customers and I'll keep on saying it and I'll even if this wasn't a talk on AI I'll just be saying it all all the time focus on delivering value to your customers better than your competition it's just good business sense and good business advice so with AI strategy right

Align AI Strategy With Business Strategy

Because AI is something that we know could be extremely useful to business. And it's only natural that we want to take a position on it and think about how we're going to apply AI.

The main thing that I want to say here is AI strategy follows your business strategy. It's not the tail that's wagging the dog. Business strategy comes first.

your AI strategy should support the goals of your business so I'm going to

Two Classic Paths: Cost Leadership and Differentiation

talk about a couple of you know kind of textbook strategy things here so a lot of business strategy kind of boils down to one of two kind of main strategy

types one is cost leadership cost leadership is where effectively you're trying to be one of the lowest cost providers so it's part of your competitive advantage you might be selling cookies you might have other competitors who are selling cookies and it's just that you can sell your cookies cheaper than they can or you can sell your cookies more profitably than they can which can give you some interesting advantages over them

and there are some things that you may want to do you might want to improve your operating leverage right so you're just trying to become more efficient to what you're doing you're getting more output from every hour worked productivity you may be looking to drive down your expenses now driving down your expenses doesn't need to mean that you're going to replace people right lots of different examples of how you

could cut your expenses let's say that you have a single supplier of something and one of the reasons why you have a single supplier even though you might not be getting the best prices is because you just can't manage having multiple relationships with different suppliers where you could seek to drive cost advantages. With AI, you may be able to do that using agentic AI.

Becoming more profitable. Now, even though becoming more profitable is not necessary cost leadership, it gives you other advantages, right? So if competitive pressure pressure comes on, then you're able to lower your prices to customers to maintain your competitive advantage.

Now, that's the boring side. The more interesting side is differentiation. So innovation, we're bringing out new products, new services. Speed to market, right?

We've got products that we want to bring out. Can we get them into the market and satisfy our customers before our competitors do? do so i'm pretty sure that each one of you are sitting there going ah yes i know what i would do with ai to do that and if not i'm sure some of the other speakers will uh will give you some

ideas as well um customer relationship management improving how you um talk to your customers sales and marketing and basically everywhere you look there's opportunities for improving your differentiation and everywhere you look there's just examples coming out of your heads about how you can use ai but the main thing here is that we're starting with business strategy and then we're thinking about how we're going to use ai to support what the goals of your business are

People, Process, Then Technology

another thing that i'm oh i messed up on my my slides there on the order um don't forget the the role like with ai and technology and particularly people in technology there's there's this kind of you know strange thing where we just gravitate to the technology right and we actually start to forget about what actually makes a business work and

I like to think about people process and technology and that you started with a bunch of people right businesses start with people businesses consist of people that's not going going to change people design processes they operate processes this is what the business does right if you don't have processes you don't your business doesn't do anything and then we use

technology to help automate our processes right and too often people start with technology thinking ah okay um i need a system to do xyz and i'm like look at the other way start with your people think about the processes that they operate think about making your processes really good processes because if you automate a bad process i think you can see where we're going with this right you just it's making a horse go faster kind of thing so with people also especially

with ai is um we've got to keep them trained we've got to educate them those people are going to be monitoring what ai does they're going to be monitoring the processes so we can't forget about how we invest in people too there we go we've got the uh the order wrong there um

i'll always say people are always your most important resource in your business and when we when i think about ai right there's a lot of narrative about uh how ai is going to replace people's roles. And I don't like to think that way.

I would rather think in terms of using AI as a force multiplier, right, rather than replacing people. If you've got a team of 10 people and you make them 50 % more efficient, 50 % more productive, well, to maintain their output

of those 10 people, sure, you could cut people. But with those 10 people, you could be doing 50 % more. So that's kind of, you know, my kind of view on that.

Key Takeaways

So key takeaways. AI is not your business strategy. AI is just a technology for us to leverage.

Don't confuse it with business strategy. Second one, focus on the right things, right?

And the right things should always be delivering value for your customers better than your competitors. And third

is that align your AI strategy to follow your business strategy. You'll get maximum benefit from that technology when it's aligned with your business strategy.

Thank you.

Questions

Any questions?