The AI Question Isn't About You. It's About Your Customer.

Based on my recent inter­view with Kai­han Krip­pen­dorff, author of ​“Out­think the Com­pe­ti­tion” and ​“Prox­im­i­ty.” The third in a three-part series drawn from that conversation.

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (5:17)

Most of the AI con­ver­sa­tions I hear in board­rooms fall into one of two camps. Camp one: we need to be all over this imme­di­ate­ly. Camp two: let’s wait and see. The whole debate is about speed, about whether to move fast or hold back.

Both camps are argu­ing about the wrong thing. The real ques­tion isn’t the tech­nol­o­gy, and it isn’t your pace. It’s your cus­tomer. My con­ver­sa­tion with Kai­han Krip­pen­dorff sharp­ened that for me, but the reframe is sim­ple: point the ques­tion outward.

The Wrong Conversation

The con­ver­sa­tion most lead­er­ship teams are hav­ing about AI is inter­nal and oper­a­tional: how do we use this to do what we already do, faster and cheaper?

That’s a legit­i­mate con­ver­sa­tion, and the effi­cien­cy gains are real. But it’s the less impor­tant half, and it can become a trap. Chase sav­ings and you end up look­ing inward, cut­ting cost inside a busi­ness mod­el that may not even sur­vive the shift. Most com­pa­nies are going to get lost chas­ing those effi­cien­cies, and a lot of the sav­ings will turn out to be false sav­ings. While you trim the back office, a smarter com­peti­tor takes the same gains and rein­vests them in serv­ing cus­tomers bet­ter. That’s how you get left behind.

The more impor­tant half of the ques­tion points out­ward. What does AI, along with the automa­tion and robot­ics arriv­ing with it, let you do for your cus­tomer that you sim­ply could­n’t do before? Not just for the cus­tomer you have today, but for that same cus­tomer two years from now, with needs they can’t ful­ly name yet. That’s a strate­gic ques­tion, and most com­pa­nies aren’t spend­ing near­ly enough time on it.

Growth, Not Just Improvement

This is where I keep com­ing back to my 4 Forces of Growth. Most improve­ment work is inter­nal. It makes you faster and lean­er, and it qui­et­ly turns your atten­tion toward your­self. Growth points the oth­er way. It keeps your atten­tion on the cus­tomer: hav­ing a big­ger impact on the peo­ple you already serve, and earn­ing new ones. It’s the same hour of strate­gic think­ing, aimed in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. One direc­tion is about you. The oth­er is about them.

The lead­ers who win the next decade won’t be the ones who used AI to run the same busi­ness a lit­tle bet­ter. They’ll be the ones who used it to serve cus­tomers in ways that weren’t pos­si­ble before, and who built a stronger com­pet­i­tive posi­tion while they did it. You solve the cus­tomer’s future prob­lem and widen your advan­tage in the same move. That is the oppor­tu­ni­ty most teams are walk­ing right past.

Build the Strat­e­gy Muscle

None of this comes from an imple­men­ta­tion roadmap. It comes from a lead­er­ship team that has built the mus­cle of ask­ing gen­uine­ly uncon­ven­tion­al ques­tions. That mus­cle, as Kai­han put it, can atro­phy. In my expe­ri­ence it atro­phies fastest in teams that live quar­ter to quarter.

Kai­han is blunt about the hori­zon. When peo­ple think quar­ter­ly, he told me, they don’t have a strate­gic bone in their body; when you get them think­ing five and ten years out, every­body becomes more strate­gic. He also frames the dis­ci­pline as zoom out, then zoom in: before you solve the prob­lem in front of you, pull back and ask where the world is head­ing, then come back to what you do next.

So the most use­ful thing a CEO can do with AI right now isn’t pick­ing a plat­form or hir­ing a Chief AI Offi­cer. It’s pro­tect­ing time for the lead­er­ship team to think, seri­ous­ly and with­out an agen­da, about what AI makes pos­si­ble in their spe­cif­ic busi­ness. Not to plan. Not to exe­cute. To think.

I’ve rec­om­mend­ed what I call Think Time to CEOs for years: a stand­ing block for non-urgent, non-oper­a­tional think­ing. The ones who hold it con­sis­tent­ly are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly the ones who spot the oppor­tu­ni­ties ear­ly, includ­ing this one. Give the whole lead­er­ship team that same stand­ing space and some­thing changes. It stops being a meet­ing and becomes a com­pet­i­tive capability.

The com­pa­nies that nav­i­gate this moment best won’t be the ones with the biggest tech­nol­o­gy bud­gets. They’ll be the ones whose lead­ers built the habit of think­ing clear­ly about the future before they need­ed to. That’s a train­able skill. Most com­pa­nies just nev­er decide to train it.

Chal­lenge

Book one hour this month with your senior team for a sin­gle ques­tion: what will our cus­tomers need from us two years from now, and what does AI, automa­tion, and robot­ics let us do about it that we could­n’t do before? Don’t talk about your oper­a­tions. Talk about theirs. The answers will sur­prise you.

Watch the Full Interview

Addi­tion­al Resources

Arti­cles

• Prox­im­i­ty: The Advan­tage of Get­ting Clos­er to the Moment of Demand
• The First Three Options are Obvi­ous. The Fourth is Strategy
• A Strate­gic View on AI for our Clients

Growth CEO Interview

• Inter­view with Quest Glob­al CEO & Co-Founder, Ajit Prabhu
• Why Your Com­pa­ny Isn’t Grow­ing — and the Inter­view Every Leader Should Watch

Growth Case Studies

• Action Solar: Foun­da­tion Over Fast Money
• CDN Con­trols: West­ern Canada’s Leader in E&I Main­te­nance, Scales Radically

Book: The 4 Forces of Growth 

• 4 minute Overview
• 45 Minute Webinar
• Buy on Amazon

Book: Scal­ing Up

• 45 Minute Webinar
• Arti­cle: 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What I’ve Learned About Growth

Book: Your Oxy­gen Mast First

• Assess your­self
• Resilience Webi­nar

About Kai­han Krippendorff

Kai­han is the author of six books, includ­ing the best­sellers Dri­ving Inno­va­tion From With­in and Out­think the Com­pe­ti­tion, and most recent­ly Prox­im­i­ty. He’s the founder of Out­thinker, a glob­al think tank where chief strat­e­gy offi­cers work through their hard­est prob­lems, and he’s been named one of the world’s top 20 man­age­ment thinkers by Thinkers50 and Glob­al Gurus. He left McK­in­sey at 29 to write his first book because he believed there was a bet­ter way to think about strat­e­gy. His frame­works have since helped gen­er­ate over $3 bil­lion in new annu­al recur­ring rev­enue for the com­pa­nies he’s worked with.