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Somewhere, a would-be founder is chewing on an idea that could change the world. Not this year, given the state of the economy and funding and the turbulence fueled by SVB, but 2024 will be the year to bring this idea to life.
What this would-be founder doesn’t yet know is that they’ll soon be in a race against time and dwindling financial reserves. The more time before they hit it big, the more likely they are to land the punch. The more money they burn without seeing enough return, the more likely they are to run out of budget before raising money or being bought.
Fortunately for this founder, the rapid innovation of AI can change the dynamics of this career, if the founder approaches AI with the right mindset.
Related: AI Can Crack Most Common Passwords in Under a Minute – Here’s How to Set Up a Secure One
How AI will save you time
Artificial intelligence is already capable of saving time on universal business initiatives like copywriting, scheduling social posts, creating and editing images, and even cash flow forecasting. If you don’t think it’s widely used at the corporate level, consider that three months after ChatGPT’s public launch, it had accumulated over 1 billion hits.
The creative idea should still come from humans who are familiar with and invested in the particular benefits of your product or service. That said, AI has some powerful creative uses. Once you understand why certain ad messages work well, distill what made them work and create edits and iterations to fit specific media channels.
Current tools, especially free ones like ChatGPT, are not perfect; founders will still need resources to quality-check each AI output for red flags. But even 60% proficiency in basic business and marketing tasks can provide significant time savings.
I recently asked ChatGPT to write a presentation schema with some specific details and parameters, and the output was surprisingly correct. This is a huge time saver for me as I don’t have a full time sales resource; our staff is almost entirely focused on customer service. If you’re not a salesperson, don’t have sales resources, and need a starting point for a pitch, a thoughtful application can save you hours of time.
Founders rarely hire enough people to fill the required skill sets right out of the gate. But tomorrow’s founders can use AI to get to a baseline of skills and knowledge quickly and efficiently.
The other big use case of AI for founders is to speed up the research process and fill knowledge gaps. Over 40% of startups that fail do so because they misread market demand, and you can use AI to stay out of that particular segment.
How? From the germination of a great idea, founders can use ChatGPT to “show me the companies that target {idea}” and refine their leads as needed to identify specific selling points and messages that already is in the market, and where there are still gaps. For example, I used this sequence of prompts:
Which SaaS companies are good at marketing attribution
Which SaaS companies are good for offline conversion tracking?
Which SaaS companies are good for OOH digital tracking?
At the end of the sequence, my production went from enterprise brands to small brands focused on niche segments, such as tracking the performance of physical surround ads in vehicles. Pick your vertical, dig deep, and find an open lane ripe for your solution.
Related: 5 Ways ChatGPT Empowers People With Disabilities
How AI will save you money
The largest percentage of a startup’s overhead costs is usually payroll. The more you spend on payroll without generating much revenue (a typical startup situation), the higher your burn multiple, which gives you less headway before raising funds and makes you much less attractive to investors. (Running out of cash is responsible for 29% of startup failures.)
While there’s a lot of work to be done on how quickly AI will replace humans (which has been a dilemma since at least the industrial age), it’s great for founders who need to save money.
(Another caveat: AI will no produce better work than experienced humans, but will be much cheaper and an acceptable substitute until the founders get funding. For example, instead of hiring a customer service team to run a hotline, run an AI-enabled chatbot that learns nuances over time and make sure you have a way to act based on input that requires human attention.)
Aside from simple human capital cost savings, AI can help founders save tons of cash by helping them manage the allocation of cash in the company. We’re already seeing many companies claiming they’re leveraging AI to connect data from Google Analytics, Meta, AdWords and others. With third-party tools that will provide a much better picture of ROI and effective budget allocation.
There’s no doubt that by 2024, founders will be able to leverage AI not only for marketing budget allocation, but also to integrate properties like your Amazon account, 3PL systems, CRM and facility production to make better proactive business decisions, reduce returns, address customer churn. and avoid excess inventory.
Related: How AI is shaping the cybersecurity landscape: Exploring the benefits and limitations
How you should approach your first hires with AI in mind
In 2024, you’ll want to prioritize AI expertise for your hiring needs. Language fluency and the ability to think creatively about ways to use AI will be important. I’m looking at competition in AI today, the same way companies looked at competition in Microsoft Office in the 2000s or Google’s suite of products in the 2010s.
If you’re building software or technology, hire engineers who can leverage AI to create code, which is more black and white than creative. Paying for manual coding will put you at a disadvantage; your engineering team should leverage AI as an extension of their skills.
Enterprises will also see the rise of a Chief AI Officer (CAIO) to build the strategy and execution of an AI tool and vendor stack. Or at least the CTO will need to focus heavily on this area to avoid falling victim to the innovator’s dilemma.
Wrap
The only thing where AI can’t help you (yet) is coming up with a great original idea that can change the world. But if you’re seeding something new and exciting and want to give yourself the best chance for success, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the AI tools that can help you along the way.
