Use AI to test and improve business ideas

The first part of building a business is to verify that your ideas are worth pursuing. Traditionally, entrepreneurs have turned to focus groups, research and market research to determine the demand for business ideas. These tactics continue to be relevant, many of which are strengthened by artificial intelligence (AI). AI helps to speed up the process of sourcing market data, creating customer personas, and prototyping ideas for better feedback. This is the way.

[Read more: How to Use AI Tools to Write a Business Plan]

How to use AI to validate your ideas with real market data

AI can speed up the research process, sourcing and analyzing market data to help you understand the demands of your products and services. With the right prompt, AI can quickly find the information they need by scanning the entire internet, including potential competitor sites.

“AI algorithms process huge datasets that include social media trends, search data and consumer behavior analysis to find market needs,” writes an expert at Pitchbob.io. “AI uses natural language processing to study customer feedback and measure public sentiment towards product ideas.”

AI tools like Perplexity and Google Trends can help you get fast data-based feedback. There are also specific AI models built for idea validation, such as the Fe/Male Switch, Validatorai and sandboxes by Dimeadozen.

Create AI-powered customer persona and user journeys

Customer journey mapping is an important part of testing business ideas. How do potential customers learn about your brand? What options do they consider? What are the unique value propositions that transform shoppers into customers? These are all questions that you can answer in customer journey mapping.

Defining customer personas and user journeys is a time-consuming process. A study by the Nielsen Norman Group Survey found that the average time it takes to create a journey map is less than two weeks.

AI can dramatically reduce that time. With a good dataset, carefully expressed prompts, and some degree of monitoring, AI can help improve the mapping of journeys, such as:

Summary of qualitative insights to highlight key steps and issues.
Segmentation of audiences based on specific criteria.
We provide basic personalization suggestions.

HubSpot provides a comprehensive guide to AI limitations in customer journey mapping and a prompt to feed AI tools to help you with this stage of idea testing. Some tools to try out include the Twilio segment, Journey AI, and Mymapai.

AI can speed up the research process, sourcing and analyzing market data to help you understand the demands of your products and services.

Use AI generated for rapid prototyping and feedback

Prototyping is one area where the generated AI can have a major impact. McKinsey estimates that when used properly, AI can reduce product development cycle times by more than 70%.

For example, industrial designers at automotive manufacturing plants used generator AI to create early design concepts for 25 variations of the next-generation car dashboard. Usually, what took more than two weeks would take the team two hours.

“These concepts were further refined by the design team using image editing software, giving us a clearer understanding of where the industry is heading for stakeholders and how to evolve the component interfaces, form factors, colours, materials, finishes and more in the latest models of electric vehicles,” reported McKinsey. “This process allowed designers to achieve product experiences in just a fraction of the time, in a much more specific way.”

Using AI in the prototyping process leads to more meaningful discussion and better feedback, as iterations occur in shorter cycles. Furthermore, AI prototypes tend to create better visualizations of concepts compared to traditional napkin sketches.

Top AI Tools for Idea Verification and Iteration

There are AI tools specifically built for the validation of ideas, then some popular AI tools that can help you brainstorm and research ideas using the appropriate prompts. Sign up for several free trials and use existing free tools to understand which platforms suit your needs.

Some of the more popular AI platforms designed to help you start a new business are:

stratup.ai to generate Ideas and narrow down your specific business solution.
FounderPal AI to validate Ideas, acquire marketing persona and create your own value proposition.
Inodash for success likelihood scores, market insights, and critical evaluation of your ideas.

Perplexity, ChatGpt, Gemini, and Claude are all generative AI engines that can provide feedback on business ideas. However, these tools can be difficult to use. You can spend a lot of time creating the prompts to get the information you need. Do a bit of research before diving in to find existing prompt templates that you can plug in to get the right data.

[Read more: Salesforce, Intuit, and ADP Execs on AI-Powered Solutions Designed to Fuel SMB Growth in 2025]

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