- How can understanding AI's True Use help your startup avoid common pitfalls and drive genuine innovation in a crowded market?
- What lessons from the early days of interactive media and the launch of the iPhone can be applied to creating groundbreaking AI products today?
Recently, we had the opportunity to discuss the keys to building a successful AI startup with Tim Smith and Joel Hladecek, the team behind Red Sky Interactive, a pioneering design agency from the 1990s. The conversation revolved around the concept of "True Use" and its critical importance in the development of revolutionary technologies. Red Sky's founders shared their experiences and insights, illustrating how understanding and leveraging True Use helped them navigate the early days of interactive media and grow their agency into one of the world's most acclaimed.
Their blog post below explores why focusing on True Use is essential for AI startups to avoid the pitfalls of under-ambition or misguided applications. They delve into historical examples and lessons from Red Sky's journey, highlighting how these principles can guide today's AI innovators. If you're curious about how to identify and harness the real value of AI, keep reading below!
Tim Smith & Joel Hladecek: AI's True Use
"Most AI startups will fail for one of two reasons. Some won’t be ambitious enough, only creating something iterative, whereas others will get too excited and use AI for a use case it isn’t ready for."
Tim Smith - Partner, Bee Partners
Joel Hladecek - Chief Creative Officer, EF Education
TL;DR
Drawing from their experience at Red Sky Interactive, Tim Smith and Joel Hladecek emphasize designing AI solutions that fully exploit new technology rather than just iterating on old methods. The key to success is identifying AI's True Use, where it uniquely excels.
They highlight the importance of a bold vision and willingness to disrupt the status quo, as seen with the interactive internet content and the iPhone's touch screen. To build a great AI startup, one must aim high, embrace innovation, and focus on AI's core strengths.
Why True Use Is The Test for Building a Truly Great AI Startup
The Two Common Pitfalls of AI Startups
Most AI startups will fail for one of two reasons. Some won’t be ambitious enough. Their product will be iterative, only pushing the technology on slightly further from where it is now. Others will get too excited and use AI for use cases where the original methods are still superior.
They’re both easy mistakes to make because we’re all feeling in the dark. No one has a clear vision of the future development of AI. But by thinking about how previous technologies evolved and survived adoption challenges, you can trace a probable path. The secret is to consider AI’s True Use – the core business and consumer applications where it’s clearly and uniquely better than incumbent methods. This is where the real value of any technology lies.
Lessons from the Past
We began emphasizing the importance of True Use to our clients when we started Red Sky Interactive, a design agency, together in the 1990s. It was the early days of interactive media and companies were beginning to think about how to exploit technologies such as the CD-ROM and the Internet. Many of them started by just putting their existing brochures onto these new media – the obvious incremental step.
But why host linear, non-interactive content on a new massive interactive infrastructure? That made no sense to us. Instead, we built truly interactive, consumer-driven content for the earliest pioneer brands like Nike, HP, Coca-Cola, and Absolut Vodka. For example, we coded a fully-working version of the classic video game Pong into a 12-kilobyte banner ad for HP. It was the first interactive banner ad on the Internet, and became so popular that people were downloading it and emailing it to their friends.
Through this obvious stepchange from static content, and our emphasis on demanding design ideas that fully exploited what the Internet could do, we grew Red Sky to more than 600 people in nine years. The company became the third most awarded interactive media company in the world, with a wall full of Cannes Lions, Clios, Webbys, and more. Tim was named the first interactive board member of the One Club in New York, and served as the president of the advertising awards in Cannes in 2001.
Challenges in the Evolution of Interactive Media
But the challenge we faced was giving clients irrefutable reasons to allocate budget to digital interactive media when they were so accustomed to, and invested in, established mediums like television, print, and radio. That led to the question: What is the True Use of the Internet and related interactive media from a design and user interaction perspective?
Online brochures felt like a ‘decadent’ stage of the Internet’s development – a ‘too obvious’ phase before it matured into something genuinely new. If you’ve read McLuhan, you know that other new media and technologies evolved similarly. Early radio involved literally reading the newspaper on air before they expanded into discussions, interviews, and live broadcasts. In turn, early television looked like filmed radio shows before producers sent cameras out into the world.
The Internet didn’t come into its own until developers and designers moved from reproducing static documents online to embracing it as an interactive – not broadcast – medium. They allowed users to self-direct, choose their own adventure, and tailor the content to their personal specifications and interests. That led to new interactive enabling technologies like Flash, Shockwave, and JavaScript, some of which have become standards while many have faded away.
A phrase you would often hear bandied about by our design team was “every click is a wish”. The simple challenge for an interactive design team was to anticipate what the user wanted to happen with every interaction, and for that response to be as magical as possible. We became pretty good at granting user-interaction ‘wishes’.
The Paradigm Shift Brought by the iPhone
Another example of a technology demonstrating True Use is the first iPhone. Before it was launched, BlackBerry and others dominated the market by iterating on existing technology. The obvious – and decadent – path was to ‘shrink’ the form-factor of a computer to a handheld format, replete with the old, familiar physical keyboard that encroached on much of the potential screen real estate.
The first iPhone shipped with a touch screen instead. It was a controversial move. “The iPhone is missing a keyboard”, ran the headline in the New York Times. But the phone Steve Jobs unveiled in 2007 is still the dominant design template for smartphones today. The decision paid off because Jobs knew that a mechanical keyboard would ultimately be a relic in a future where the visible interactive online world – an all-screen experience – was key to the ultimate form factor of a mobile device.
Defining True Use in the Context of AI
The question now is: What is the True Use of a technology evolution, or dare we say new medium, like AI? We think it’s similar to the disruptive design and development innovations that had to happen to express the media power of the Internet fully (as well as the evolution, as McLuhan described, of all of the major technology and media step changes since the 1950s). This included ceding much more control over the experience from the author to the user.
The most successful AI companies, many of them likely startups, will be the ones that are not afraid of breaking new ground in terms of creative design and engineering. They’ll ignore sunk costs and ‘acceptable’ modalities in order to explore what AI is most adept at, and frankly ‘learn’ from the tech. Much of that innovation will likely revolve around a complete re-think of human-machine interaction, with an emphasis on software and hardware designs that more readily capture and interpret context in near real-time. Our current devices and applications will likely not suffice.
Conclusion
If you want to build that future, you’ve got to be ambitious. Financial, technical, and bureaucratic pressures will limit you in that journey, so your vision has to be extra bold to start with. As we often reminded our design and engineering teams: “Shoot for the moon and land on the roof.” If your vision isn’t big enough, you're unlikely to induce real change.
You should also be prepared for backlash from the market. Incumbent players often see a disruptive way of doing things as ‘vulgar’ when it threatens long-held ways of designing, building, and deploying. But the good news is you may need to worry less about your competitors who will often be following a more conservative path. If you want to build something truly great in AI, consider what a ‘magical’ solution might look like, discounting precedent designs and standards that may well be constraining your ideation. And know that envisioning and introducing radical new approaches is frankly essential to enabling a new technology to realize its full potential. That is its True Use.
3 Key Takeaways:
- Ambitious Innovation in AI: AI startups need to aim for groundbreaking innovations rather than incremental improvements or inappropriate applications. Successful AI ventures will find areas where AI is uniquely and significantly superior to existing methods, focusing on True Use, where AI can create substantial value.
- Historical Lessons in Technology Adoption: Learning from past technological evolutions, like the shift from static online content to interactive experiences and the introduction of the touchscreen iPhone, is crucial. The True Use concept highlights the need for AI to be employed in ways that fully exploit its capabilities, rather than merely replicating existing solutions.
- Overcoming Challenges with Bold Vision: Building a great AI startup requires a bold vision and resilience against market and incumbent resistance. Innovative AI companies will need to rethink human-machine interactions and push beyond conventional designs to realize the full potential of AI, emphasizing creativity, user-centric design, and real-time contextual understanding.
Tim Smith is a Partner at Bee Partners and Joel Hladecek is Chief Creative Officer at EF Education. Click here for more insightful content, or here if you are a Founder innovating in any of our three vectors.
No Comments.