I have encountered many founders who are very excited to use AI to create their businesses; asking AI to validate all aspects of it for them: the market, competition, pricing, customer buying drivers, marketing and sales channels, costs, etc.
Literally, they can have a complete deck and business plan by pressing a few buttons and telling AI what they want to achieve. This can be done in a fraction of the time it would have taken a few years ago, and many accelerators and incubators are leaning in. They are pushing and highly encouraging founders to use these tools.
I believe that founders should consider tools that help them build their business faster, better, cheaper, etc. However, one dimension is often neglected - which is as important as the business itself - learning.
AI tools are extremely helpful in getting founders situated with all the key things they need to consider for their business; however, the results AI generates - the insights - have not distilled from the founder’s own neurons, which may hollow out the ground truth about their business.
I’ve seen founders miss-out in developing the intuition they need when making tough decisions with scarce data, when a quick and dirty decision may make or break the business. For example, faced with a decision to accept or reject an expensive pilot project for a steep discount to acquire a prestigious customer or whether to offer a star sales person an above-market package to secure his or her availability. AI tools may not be able to assist the founder in these circumstances.
Building this kind of intuition follows deep reflection and learning from experience. The only way to gather this experience is by experimenting in real life, with real people and real things. These experiments can certainly be setup with the help of AI, but the progress of running them to disprove some core belief about something, is uniquely human.
I often remind founders that anything they develop is for other humans (even businesses that target pets as users) and for satisfying some kind of unmet human need. AI may assist in unearthing data about these, but certainly does not understand the intuition that goes with being human, and this, my friends, is where your true differentiator lies.