Unlocking AI in Product Development: Strategies and Advantages

AI is nothing to fear, in fact, it can enhance your product development lifecycle. True, it’s not a quick fix, but the benefits speak for themselves – if you have the right team to drive your vision forward,

AI technology began life in the 1970’s in a small number of manufacturing facilities across the globe, where it was used to incorporate ideas straight into the manufacturing process without the need for multiple meetings and sticky notes. As a result, we can safely say that AI and product development go hand-in-hand.  

However, with the recent explosion of various AI systems, you need to ask yourself what role AI can play in your product development process moving forward, and how can you ensure your organization gets the best out of the opportunities these new systems create? Keep reading to find out more. 

People drive product development – not AI 

Before we start, we need to address the AI-based elephant in the room.  

Everyone knows that injecting AI into any business process increases efficiency and produces better products in general, which leads to better return on investment (ROI) for company stakeholders. All of this is possible because AI can manage repetitive business tasks much faster than its human counterparts, while also processing bigger data loads, thanks to highly developed computing processes. 

Read also: How AI and Cloud Computing Have Transformed Business Operations

This enables your workforce to focus on more business-critical tasks while AI picks up the slack, which is why many organizations see it as the silver bullet that will solve all their current business woes. But don’t be fooled, AI is only as good as the data provided to it – the current systems on the market don’t understand context, and need specific prompts from your people to generate the results you want.  

In short, it doesn’t matter what you want to leverage AI for – it’s not magic, and it needs your support to produce the efficiency, products, and ROI it’s famous for.  

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The role of AI in product development 

With the elephant in the room addressed, let’s get down to brass tacks – how can AI improve your product development lifecycle and where can you implement it to achieve the best results? 

Well, the wonderful thing about AI and product development working hand-in-hand for five decades is that you can now implement it into every stage of the product development lifecycle, from inception to launch and beyond. For example:  

• AI-based project management: gives you a better sense of how long development will take, an accurate estimation of how much it will cost, and what resources you will need to deliver your product on time. 
• AI-powered strategy development: breaks down complex projects into bitesize, achievable tasks that enable your teams to work in a proven agile development format, which gives them the flexibility needed to deal with challenges as they occur.  
• AI-driven minimal value products (MVPs): enables you to accelerate MVPs to market, which in turn, gives you access to customer feedback much quicker and ensures you build a better product moving forward 
• AI-powered security: makes it easier for your system to recognize unusual data through big data pools and AI models, while also making checking for vulnerabilities and scanning for any viruses etc. much simpler 
• AI-based quality assurance: delivers a more accurate QA process through machine –learning based technologies –, saving you time and money and ensuring your product will experience less problems once it goes live 
• AI-driven marketing: makes decision making much simpler, for example, by analyzing the data available to it your AI-based system can tell you who interacts with your brand the most, and what products or services your customers are interested in. 
• AI-powered customer support: enables you to use chatbots or other LangChain tools to gather information on customer preferences and past purchases, so you can offer them more personalized customer experiences in the future. 

However, this is just a taste of the various roles AI can play in your product development lifecycle. Other key areas include requirement gathering, architecture design, front-end design, DevOps and many more.  

Read also: AI in Banking: Trends, Examples, Benefits and Challenges

With five decades of history behind the relationship between AI and product manufacturing, there’s too much to cover here. Therefore, if you would like to know more about all the areas AI can help you in across the product development lifecycle, Software Mind’s data science services experts would love to hear from you. 

AI in the product development process 

Now you have an idea of AI’s limitations and some idea of the roles it can play. But how do you ensure you’re taking the right approach to implementing AI into your product development lifecycle and how do you know you have the right people in place to build a product successfully? 

It comes down to two things. You need to do your research and ensure your people have the skills needed to implement AI effectively. There’s no point developing a product nobody wants, and there’s no point forcing AI into your organization if your people don’t know how to leverage it effectively.  

Implementing AI into the idea generation process is a good way to solve the first of these problems. Your organization already has vast amounts of data telling you what your customers want. So, implementing AI into the ideation process from the very beginning is a great way to ensure the next product you develop is something the market actually wants. And once you know what you want to develop, you just need to decide how you will stand out from the crowd by researching how your competitors leverage AI, in addition to how, and where, you will leverage it during your own product development lifecycle. 

Finally, if your team doesn’t know how to leverage AI effectively, you have two options: you can either spend time and money training them up, which is a good option if you want to keep things in-house, or you can look into outsourced software product development, which is a proven way to deliver new skillsets to any organization quickly and easily. 

Expertly implement AI into your product development  

In conclusion, AI has been around a lot longer than most of us think. However, this long history means AI now permeates every aspect of the product development lifecycle – from insights and strategy to design and engineering.  

This means if you want to improve efficiency, deliver better products to market, or give your stakeholders greater ROI, then the options for implementing AI into your ways of working are almost limitless.  

At Software Mind, we’re aware that too much choice can be both a blessing and a curse, so if you want more information on what AI can do for you, our experts are standing by. 

Read also: AI in ecommerce

Read also: Outsourced product development