How to find AI business opportunities in your customer base?

AI is destroying jobs and business models, but creating something 100X bigger. This might seem hard to believe, but through the long lens of history, the pattern is obvious.

Before the printing press, scribes earned good money copying Bibles by hand. Gutenberg’s press wiped out that industry – but it created a hundred new ones: publishing, subscriptions, advertising, newspapers, pulp fiction, copyright law, textbooks, toner cartridges, and eventually Pokémon cards.

Economists call this latent demand – needs that exist but can't be profitably served until technology changes. It's fiendishly hard to spot because humans struggle to notice the absence of a thing.

But latent demand can be huge – Meta, Google, Salesforce, YouTube, and Stripe were unimaginable before the Internet, and are now worth trillions.

We can’t imagine the future AI will enable, but we can discover it. If you already serve a customer segment, you've got a huge head start.

How to discover the biggest AI business opportunities hiding in your customer base? (Before your competitors)

Study your customers' daily routines and look for two types of opportunities:

Job replacement:

• What manual work could AI do now?

• What can only rich people / big companies afford that everyone needs?

• Which jobs pay unreasonably well and could be augmented by AI?

• What requires buying the whole thing when people only need it occasionally?

• What middle-men, taking 20%+, could AI eliminate?

New categories:

• What unpleasant realities do our customers accept with resignation?

• What becomes infinitely scalable that used to require humans each time?

• What are people doing in huge volumes for free that we could facilitate and monetize?”

• What massive human need goes unserved because it's too expensive to deliver?

Don't fall in love with your ideas. Test as many as possible, as quickly as you can, using minimum viable experiments.

Huge opportunities are hiding in plain sight. Go find them.

I hope this helps!