Bryan Kirschner, VP of Strategy, DataStax
Consumers love smart personalization. The developer is passionate about building his AI-powered apps. And just two months after ChatGPT’s launch, 100 million people have added harnessing the power of AI to their toolbox.
These signals point to the future of “AI Everywhere,” a future in which AI becomes a power for every company and a sidekick (or “co-pilot,” in Microsoft parlance) for every employee.
“Cognitive capital” refers to the stock of knowledge, skills, and abilities that an individual uses to create economic value. As humans access and leverage AI more and more, and as organizations master the use of AI to provide people with ever-increasing immediacy, scope and scale of knowledge, we will see a significant increase in cognitive capital. Standing at the entrance of the increase.
For companies that want to stay relevant to the status quo, going that route is crucial. However, the speed of delivering new use cases or the size of data assets alone is not enough to realize the potential of AI. Much more is needed to separate the winners and losers of tomorrow’s AI.
How Organizations ‘Reinvent the World’
Cognitive capital is a subset of intellectual capital. The latter is a broad concept that also includes other types of intangible assets owned by an organization, such as patents, trademarks, customer relationships, and organizational culture.
Organizations that build learning cultures excel at building more and deeper customer relationships because they incorporate the insights provided by Ikujiro Nonaka in the 1991 Harvard Business Review article.
“Companies are living beings, not machines. Just like individuals, they can have a collective identity and a basic purpose. A shared understanding of where we are headed, what kind of world we want to live in, and most importantly, how to make that world a reality.”
For these companies, the north star of value creation is “reinventing the world according to specific visions and ideals.” Modern AI expands the toolset to achieve this, but other tools such as slogans, metaphors, and symbols may be ‘low-tech’ but equally essential for innovation that moves the needle.
We can already see the power and promise of getting this right.
target affordable pleasure
Target is a power user of the best technologies for real-time AI, such as Apache Cassandra. The company is fully committed to AI, as a Forbes article claims:
“Target can now use artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend products based on searches, help forecast and order demand, and the entire supply chain. Used for planning, pricing, product promotion, and for smaller initiatives such as investigating the quality of the images a company places on its website or correcting an item configuration error .”
But in reality metaphors and slogans are behind their winning methods. “Joy” was mentioned 10 times in the company’s Q4 2022 earnings call. Specifically, “Affordable Delight” is a concept that has been a unique and key differentiator for Target for decades.
Executives provide a metaphor in their records to make interactions “not just a means to an end, but a destination.” They promise to provide “inspiration”.
AI Success Requires Leadership
As customer expectations rise, companies across all industries will have little choice but to deploy more AI use cases (e.g., real-time replacement recommendations for out-of-stock items in e-commerce). ). But companies that motivate their employees with a strong vision take full advantage of AI tools and new AI capabilities. Because they ask questions and imagine new directions for the evolution of the world and customer relationships that other organizations cannot.
Today, ChatGPT offers 9 useful answers to the question, “How can a retailer build a private label brand with $1 billion in annual revenue?” Target has successfully done this 10 times (and trademarked each along the way).
A popular AI tool’s answer to, “How can retailers provide an affordable and enjoyable shopping experience for middle-class Midwestern mothers?” was pretty good too. But there is no AI-powered strategy to turn “must buy on budget” into “show me your tarsey with enthusiasm.”
Ignore the AI if you want to lose. But if you want to lose to AI, ignore the proven power of employees motivated by a shared vision in a culture of learning. Only human leadership can produce it.
Learn how DataStax enables real-time AI.
About Brian Kirshner:
Brian is the Vice President of Strategy at DataStax. For more than 20 years, we have helped build and execute strategies for large companies looking for new ways to move forward and a future that is radically different from the past. He specializes in removing fear, uncertainty and doubt from strategic decision-making through empirical data and market sensing.
