The Evergreen Concept of Strategy in the GenAI Era
Day 4 of #100daysofgenerativeAI
We are at Day 4, after understanding the landscape, foundational knowledge of how machines learn, and the key trends in AI space.
Now I will point you to today’s resource, an excellent and evergreen read on strategy. This is a very old post, but it is equally valid today.
Why am I sharing this in the GenAI series — a part of my responsibility is to give you a meaty signal and not necessarily look to the next shiny thing.
But before that, let me share three key factors that build your decision muscle and will help you build a lens through which you can hone your perspective of how to be agile and think through on your feet in the era of rapidly evolving technology.
- Innovation vs. FOMO — GenAI became table stakes in no time, so executives started to feel the fear of missing out and wanted to leverage time to market as a competitive edge. If you can do it, good for you. But being a first mover also means thinking through the downsides. Have I accounted for all the regulations, compliance, and impact of it on stakeholders — internal and external?
- The second point is to look left, right, and center — you must understand the industry and sector dynamics. What are your peers doing — why are they doing that, and how? Again, it gives you a perspective. But what should you do with this information?
Take it as one of the signals to go deeper within your organizational goals because your business is uniquely positioned to make or not make similar moves. It is for you to decide how to react to the competition. So, while looking left and right is important, it is ultra-important to look deeper.
- Think of what technology enables us to achieve — it can help streamline business processes, bring operational efficiencies, and enable understanding of the business model — but largely, these bring small changes. There is a delicate balance between what can be easily solved today, which is low-hanging fruits or quick wins to keep up the morale, vs. what brings the benefits of a larger scale.
The post I mentioned, in the beginning, is available for a full read on HBR.
It will cover how companies need to adopt an agile mindset and adapt rapidly to new developments.
It also talks about the difference between operational effectiveness and strategy.
Once you finish reading it, consider how OpenAI positioned itself and marched ahead of its competition — and relate it to how
“differentiation arises from both the choice of activities and how they are performed”, and “developing better products faster “ — HBR
The definition of “better” here is debatable. Still, talks are ongoing that transformer architecture was “Google’s baby” and is benefitting the ones who made better use of it faster.
It is important to know what is unnecessary than what needs to be done. Being nimble and focusing singularity — that’s where I talk about achieving a larger magnitude of scale.
Once you have extracted the juice from operational effectiveness, it looks like the end of the road.
“The result is zero-sum competition, static or declining prices, and pressures on costs that compromise companies’ ability to invest in the business for the long term.” — HBR
Being competitive means doing things differently than your peers i.e. USP explained through an example of Ikea, the global furniture retailer.
It will be a long read, and I hope I have made it interesting enough for you by sharing key highlights and the backdrop of linking it with the race to the top being witnessed in the tech world today.
You can watch the video here:
Do share if you have any comments or want me to make a detailed video.
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Hi 👋 , I am Vidhi Chugh, working on transformative and trustworthy AI solutions.
I am on a #100dayjourney to share the key milestones, developments, and insights in the #genai space.
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