AI still a buzzword for tech startups

Artificial Intelligence has been a buzzword for a while now in the startup space and it doesn't seem to be losing momentum. However, given how long people have been using it as a buzzword and not as an actual deliverable in their software, customers and investors are now very sceptical of anyone who advertises its use. As a founder of an AI-focused startup, I'm completely on board with this scepticism. 

I find myself on a fairly consistent defence of our AI implementation. What is it really doing? How is it impacting our target market? How much of the total software is actually AI-driven? The truth of it is, not a whole lot! It's only about 5% of the total product at this stage. In future, I would say it gets to a maximum of 20%. The rest of the product is your standard, yet elegant and efficient implementation of business logic. What's important though is the business impact of that 5-20% and how does the rest of our product benefit the customer. 

Focus on Business Impact 

This AI impact is really what I believe should be the focal point of any AI-based startup. The reason for such high criticism is because many startups implement an "out-of-the-box" chatbot that uses simple NLP to get answers from their existing website FAQ and slap 'AI' on their startup profile. Really, what's the impact of that on a potential customer? It probably only affects the pre-sales process or onboarding experience a little for those that get stuck. Long term business impact is 0. 

For tribu, our first implementation has targeted a key decision point that our partners face multiple times a day – when a customer replies to a support request, we predict a course of action to the assisting technician and offer easy, single-click automation to resolve it. The business impact of a very small piece of AI is significant because it impacts customer service multiple times per day and improves efficiency in those responses. Simple and easy display of pre-decision information followed by efficient post AI recommendation business logic. 

As part of this year's primary objective, "automating Level 1 IT support requests using Artificial Intelligence", the customer response prediction and the automation around it represents only 20% of the total process, but it's integral to achieving the overall objective. We have several more key objectives to implement, with some completed now in beta and going through fine-tuning. 

A startup with AI versus an AI startup 

For those reading this, wanting to understand if AI should be part of their startup profile I would first suggest asking yourself this question: 

"What would your product be able to achieve if the AI component was taken out?" 

If you are still solving a pain point for your target market, I suspect AI is not an important part of your product or service, and that's perfectly okay! 

Understand that NOT having AI in your startup profile doesn't create a disadvantage if you have the important product-market fit. That should be your focus ahead of any buzzword! If you are relieving a pain point for your target market, don't confuse your marketing channels with AI language, there's just no long term benefit. 

If AI is a critical part of your solution to that pain point, be clear and open to what it is doing. Something we at tribu have learnt from the early days is not to oversell our AI capabilities when it's still in its infancy. 

Our initial product release was solving some real-world pain points for IT Support providers, but we clouded the pre-sales efforts by mixing in too much 'AI' talk before it was ready to talk about and because of that, customer expectations were misaligned with our early product. There was a lot of time lost in re-aligning our early adopters to what our product was delivering at that early stage. That's time we could have put towards move fruitful efforts. 

This is the first of many opinion, review and retrospective articles I'll be doing as part of my journey in AI from a startup founder perspective. I'll also be diving into some AI technical subjects from time to time as our research bears more fruit. For anyone interested in Artificial Intelligence, AI in startups or in particular, commercialising AI feel free to follow me or message me here on LinkedIn or my Twitter account.