In the early 1900s, Mary Anderson, a serial inventor from Alabama, was traveling on a streetcar in New York City when she noticed a problem. The driver repeatedly stopped to clear snow and sleet from the windscreen, making the journey slow and dangerous. Inspired, Mary designed the first windscreen wiper in her small workshop.
With cars not yet widely adopted, Mary pitched her invention to local public transportation operators in snowy cities. However, they swiftly dismissed her idea as unnecessary and impractical, believing that drivers could continue clearing windscreens manually, as they had always done.
It wasn’t until years later, when the car industry began to boom, that wipers became a standard feature on cars. By this time, Anderson’s patent on her invention had expired, and she failed to capitalise on her new technology. Anderson faded into obscurity, and her role in the history of the automobile was largely forgotten.
How different Mary’s opportunity would have been if cars had been mass-produced already, if the local operators had been able to think outside the existing paradigm, or if her clients had been able to implement the new technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their products.
JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon highlighted in his annual letter to shareholders this week, that AI could be as transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years, likening it to the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing, and the Internet etc.
A survey this week by Adecco and Oxford Economics reveals that while 61% of executives believe AI is a game changer for their industry – with even higher percentages in the tech and automotive sectors – 57% lack confidence in their leadership team’s AI skills and knowledge.
Just as Mary Anderson’s clients failed to recognize the potential of her windscreen wiper invention, many businesses today risk missing out on the transformative power of AI as they struggle to understand its potential, where it will integrate into their organisations and what skills and knowledge are required to do so. We are on the boundary of an amazing opportunity, yet very few seem to know where to stick the windscreen wiper.
As Professor Ethan Mollick (author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI) tweeted this week: “A thing that I keep seeing in organizations I talk to: a few senior people are experimenting with AI in their work and realizing that this is going to be a huge deal in their industry…. yet they have huge trouble getting their colleagues to even try the systems out seriously.”
AI is serving up potential competitive advantage for companies; every week we cover real-world examples of how AI is surpassing human capabilities and disrupting industries; it’s music this week, it was software development with “Devin” a few weeks ago. So, with this in mind, how do the vast number of business respond to this transformative tech?
Current they don’t. AI has an adoption problem. A big mismatch between opportunity and implementation.
Yes, many companies have implemented low-level chatbot or meeting note automation tool. The real value of AI to gain competitive advantage does not lie in the periphery of personal efficiency enhancements. It will lie in incorporating additional, superior intelligence into the core value streams, your combined set of activities that add value to your customers.
Takeaways: AI has an adoption problem, but unlike the past, we don’t have the luxury to watch from the sidelines and wait for others to solve it. AI is here. Go use it. Now.