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Tag Archives: #InnovationLeadership

Beyond the AI buzz: Delivering measurable results through real-world examples

I still remember working on an AI initiative 5-6 years ago for a healthcare company that wanted to transform the patient experience. At that time, AI wasn’t readily accessible to everyone. There were no consumer grade AI assistants generating content on demand. There were no established implementation playbooks. Organizations that pursued AI were often entering relatively uncharted territory.

We were building what felt like a first-of-its-kind platform designed to simplify interactions between patients and healthcare providers using AI. While the vision was exciting, the project was filled with uncertainty. Questions such as how to train the model, how frequently retraining should occur, what datasets should be used, what level of accuracy was acceptable, and what operational costs would look like remained largely unanswered. Every decision felt like an experiment.

Today, most of those technical barriers have been significantly reduced. Powerful AI models are available through cloud providers and APIs. Organizations can now build capabilities in weeks that previously would have taken years. But while many technical challenges have become easier, business challenges have become significantly harder.

The challenge today is no longer whether AI works. The challenge is whether companies understand the operational, financial, and governance implications of deploying AI at scale.

One of the most overlooked aspects of AI adoption is cost predictability. Historically, organizations planned budgets around relatively stable variables such as labor, infrastructure, licensing, and operational expenses. Financial forecasts could be created quarterly and adjusted annually with reasonable confidence.

AI is changing that equation. A company’s AI consumption could fluctuate dramatically based on customer adoption and usage patterns. An application might consume 100,000 tokens on one day and 10 Million tokens the next. A highly successful AI-powered feature can introduce operational costs that were never anticipated during planning.

For technology giants such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia, these fluctuations can often be absorbed because of their scale and ability to invest heavily in AI infrastructure. For most organizations, however, especially those dependent on product revenue and operating within tighter margins, this new consumption driven model introduces uncertainty that many finance teams have never had to manage before. Thus, today’s companies should shift their focus from “Can we build it?” to “Can we sustainably support it?” That is where organizations need a different approach.

So, let me provide you some pointers through which you can implement AI sustainably in your organization.

1. Use AI as a Tool, Not a Strategy:

One of the most common mistakes organizations make is treating AI as a technology initiative instead of a business initiative. AI should never be implemented simply because it is available or because a competitor is using it. If you want to be successful in this AI race, then you need to identify a specific business outcome and then determine whether AI is the right tool to achieve that outcome.

Instead of asking: “How can we use AI?”, you should ask: “What business problem are we trying to solve?”. The answers should be measurable and meaningful, not just some buzz words. For example, AI will reduce customer service costs by X%, or it will improve employee productivity by Y%, or it will increase customer retention by Z%, etc.

In one Fortune 500, I was called to coach the team in launching an AI chatbot because competitors had announced similar initiatives. But after several workshops, I identified the underlying problem. The real issue turned out to be the excessive amount of time employees spent searching for information across disconnected systems to help their customers. So, rather than building a flashy external facing solution, we implemented an AI-powered knowledge search platform for internal users. Adoption was immediate, employee productivity improved by 20%, and the ROI justified the costs of tokens. Thus, I recommend that you should also focus on outcomes first and technology second.

2. Start With High-Value Use Cases

Many Fortune 500 companies are attempting AI transformation through large, organization-wide initiatives. While it might work for 20% of the top tech companies, I believe that other Orgs should identify use cases that are easy to measure and relatively low risk, before heavily investing into AI transformation. In some of the companies where I have recently consulted, I often see AI augmentation opportunities within internal knowledge management, customer support automation, document summarization, meeting intelligence, workflow automation, and sales enablement.

For example, in one of the largest companies, we introduced AI-generated meeting summaries for their sales calls. While this initiative sounds relatively small compared to larger transformation, the productivity gains and lead conversion rates were transformational for the company. SDRs and BDRs had all the insights about their clients on their fingertips and they spent less time in refreshing their memories and more time in converting the lead into an actual sale.

Thus, I believe that AI should be used in these targeted initiatives to provide immediate value and actual ROI. This approach isn’t flashy, but it works. Small wins create confidence, confidence creates momentum, and momentum enables scale.

3. Build Guardrails Before Scaling

Once organizations begin seeing success, there is a natural temptation to expand AI rapidly. After all, C-Suites are pushed by their stakeholders to show big wins through AI quickly.

However, I believe that AI adoption without governance can quickly become expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to manage. I strongly believe that all the Orgs should establish guardrails before broad deployment. This includes monitoring usage trends, creating cost management controls, setting spending thresholds, defining approval processes, implementing security standards, and establishing performance monitoring frameworks.

Recently, I was coaching this S&P 500 company that had seen situations where individual departments adopted multiple AI solutions independently. Marketing purchased one platform, operations implemented another, and customer support selected a third. While each decision appeared reasonable in isolation, the organization eventually found itself managing overlapping vendors, inconsistent security controls, and rapidly increasing costs. Thus, I strongly recommend you to think through your AI strategy and implement internal support systems for building guardrails and governance before everything goes out of hand.

In the end, the organizations that succeed with AI over the next decade will not necessarily be those spending the most money or tokens. They will be the companies that approach AI with discipline. They will understand the difference between experimentation and strategy. They will balance innovation with governance, ambition with financial accountability, and opportunity with measurable outcomes. Most importantly, they will stop asking: “How can we say we are using AI?” And instead ask: “Where can AI create sustainable business value?” That distinction may seem small, but it changes everything.

The future will not belong to companies that can simply claim they use AI. It will belong to companies that can clearly demonstrate why they use AI, how they govern it, and the value it delivers. Because in the end, AI should be more than a buzzword. It should be an impact multiplier.

How AI is Redefining Product Management: From Writing PRDs to Rasing the Bar

28 May

During my second week at Facebook, mid-pandemic, onboarding remotely into the VR org, I joined a product review where a PM spent more time challenging their own proposal than defending it. Before anyone else could question it, they walked through what might break, where adoption could fail, and what risks Legal or Infra would raise. By the time feedback started, most of the obvious objections had already been addressed.

That was my first real glimpse into how the strongest product managers operate. They don’t just present ideas, they argue with them. I have seen similar behavior in startups, but there it usually comes from necessity, limited resources force sharper thinking. In Fortune 500 companies, this kind of rigor comes from discipline.

That’s where AI changes the game today. AI gives every PM a first-pass sparring partner, but only if you use it the right way. Today, most teams use AI to generate PRDs, architecture docs, epics, and user stories. That’s useful, but it misses the point.

The real leverage shows up when AI becomes the voice that challenges you: “Here’s what you might be wrong about.” It’s particularly effective at surfacing blind spots like downstream dependencies, operational risks, users you overlooked, or costs that don’t show up in feature narratives.

Over the past few years, I have coached many PMs to use AI differently. Instead of asking it to generate output, we trained AI to think like stakeholders. At Amazon, for example, we created detailed personas for 3rd party sellers, engineering leaders, legal, finance, marketing, and operations teams. PMs would then prompt AI to respond from those perspectives:

What would Legal push back on?
How would Finance evaluate this investment?
What risks would Operations flag?
What architectural dependencies could delay the launch?

Early on, the outputs had rough edges. But as models improved, this approach became increasingly powerful, because product decisions rarely live in isolation.

One PM I worked with used this exact approach while planning a new seller facing feature. On the surface, it looked straightforward, improving onboarding flows to increase seller activation. The PRD was clean, the metrics were strong, and engineering had already sized it.

Before finalizing, we ran the idea through stakeholder based AI prompts. When prompted as “Legal,” AI flagged a potential compliance issue with how seller data was being surfaced across regions. When prompted as “Finance,” it highlighted an unaccounted cost in supporting international payment reconciliation. And from an “Operations” lens, it exposed a spike in expected support tickets due to onboarding ambiguity in edge cases.

None of these were obvious in the original proposal. Catching them early avoided what would have likely been a delayed launch and a much more expensive fix post-release. That’s the real value.

Over time, PMs who use AI this way will produce sharper, clearer proposals, not because AI wrote them, but because weak thinking was exposed earlier, grounded in data and organizational context. Thus, AI becomes a forcing function for rigor. And that leads to a broader implication: Product excellence has never been about output volume. It has always been about decision quality and the outcomes those decisions drive.

AI is now raising the bar for decision hygiene and quietly exposing teams that rely on intuition without validation.