I bet if you walked around Apple's HQ in the '90s and said that "Apple TV" was going to produce "Ted Lasso," people wouldn't have believed it. It's hard to see how things will evolve.
AI just made 2025's "long-term" concepts available now — and, in turn, it's bringing evolution right behind it. So here's an important idea: the evolution will be won by those who begin now.
Some new (or former "long-term") things that are possible today
- Mine your meeting transcripts and sales pitches, anonymize them, and create content.
- Rapidly onboard new employees — their devices, email, and network credentials; training on the product and codebase; marketing strategy; even 1:1s to meet the team.
- Tackle tech debt. Modernize that old system in less time and at a fraction of the cost.
- Study the codebase, document it, and augment your knowledge base — your product managers and your customer service team will thank you. So will customers.
- Prepare everyone's quarterly review materials: study calendars, meeting notes, presentations, and metrics on work product, compare against quarterly goals — instantly done, and you can watch it evolve through the quarter.
- Generate a first-cut redline, tailored to your legal team's posture.
- Break down a new competitor's product in moments.
- Mine past sales calls for conversations about a feature you just launched.
- Auto-review hours and hours of session-replay video, identify friction, and fix it.
These ideas are pretty simple. But what's going to be fascinating is what evolves out of them — and the velocity at which it happens.
It's easy to see a cost saving from AI in your execution engine, but it's impossible to estimate the potential of the next evolution of the company. Those ideas you can't imagine yet — though they'll soon become obvious next steps — are pretty undervalued right now.