With all the talk around AI, my favorite way of thinking about it is building software to “Iron Man” a job function. “Iron Man” is a famous movie and superhero where the idea is that an inventor creates a suit that gives them superpowers. The inventor is productive on their own, but when adding the Iron Man suit, they gain the ability to fly, battle enemies, analyze situations much faster, and control other systems. All these abilities get integrated into the person, becoming the proverbial man and machine combination.
Just like with the industrial age, where the invention of machines helped increase productivity, we’re now in the AI age. We’ve had computers, software, and technology for a long time, but AI fills in that missing piece around intelligence. AI enhances decision-making, decision support systems, and analysis, allowing us to look at volumes of data and find patterns in ways that were never previously attainable.
When we think about different categories of software, the most obvious ones are the big employment centers like sales, marketing, support, engineering, operations, finance, and HR. But, just like these mainstream categories, there are thousands of long-tail categories of employees or job functions that also need their own Iron Man AI system.
Take healthcare, education, and the legal profession, each with its own specific job functions. Every single job function will have both general-purpose AI tools, like ChatGPT, as well as job-specific AI tools that create the Iron Man capabilities for that job function. So when people say they want to build AI for vertical SaaS, one way to think about it is whether it’s for vertical SaaS across the business or a job function. Are you building software for dentists to run their whole dental practice, or is there a better opportunity to build an AI Iron Man suit for one specific category of employee like the new patient coordinator, one specific job function, and then go really deep with that as the wedge into the market?
Every market is different, and every opportunity has to be evaluated on its own. One recommendation is to go to the individual job function and think through the AI Iron Man suit functionality to make that person ten times more productive or to enable the employer to fulfill the mission of that role in a way that is more scalable, more distributed, or more economical. Build software to Iron Man the power of a job function.
Entrepreneur
via https://www.aiupnow.com
David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
