When I work with business leaders and their teams, one of the most common challenges I hear is: "We know AI is important, but there are so many tools and possibilities and we don't know where to start." The landscape of AI tools, techniques, and applications seems to expand daily, making it difficult to separate meaningful opportunities from this week's hyped tool. Leaders often find themselves caught between the pressure to "do something with AI" and the paralysis that comes from too many options.
To address this, I use a framework that helps organizations think systematically about the business value they can create with generative AI. Rather than getting lost in the technical capabilities or chasing every new tool that emerges, this framework focuses on three distinct types of opportunities that every business can pursue, regardless of industry or size.
The first bucket is Boosting Productivity - using AI to help your teams work faster, smarter, and with greater impact. This turns your focus on internal processes, and may include automating repetitive tasks, accelerating creative processes like content creation and analysis, and augmenting human capabilities in areas like research, writing, and decision-making. The goal here is to eliminate friction and amplify what your people do best.
The second bucket is Creating New Value - enhancing your existing products, services, and customer experiences with AI capabilities. This might mean adding personalization features to your platform, improving customer support with intelligent chatbots, or using AI to deliver insights that weren't previously possible. These opportunities often provide immediate value to customers while strengthening your competitive position.
The third bucket is Driving Disruption - reimagining business models, value chains, and entire market approaches through AI. This is where you question fundamental assumptions about how your industry operates and explore entirely new ways of creating and delivering value. While these opportunities often require longer-term thinking, they can fundamentally reshape your competitive landscape. If you do not pursue or prepare for them - others soon will.
The real power of this framework lies not in choosing one bucket over others, but in building a portfolio that spans all three. Start with productivity wins to build confidence and generate quick returns, enhance your core offerings to delight customers and defend market share, and explore disruptive possibilities to position yourself for the future. Each bucket requires different timelines, risk tolerances, and success metrics, but together they create a comprehensive approach to business value and innovation with AI.
In future issues of this newsletter, I'll dive deeper into each of these three buckets, sharing specific strategies, real-world examples, and practical tools you can use to identify and pursue opportunities in each area. The key is to start somewhere - and this framework gives you the roadmap to begin with intention rather than being overwhelmed.
I dive deeper into this three-bucket framework in the AI Biz podcast, where I explain how to build a portfolio across productivity, product enhancement, and disruption opportunities.