Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community!

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Society has overspent on new technology ever since completion of the transcontinental railroad. Probably longer.

But no matter the technology – it all becomes commodity over time.

Comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Differentiation

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

If everyone has AI, what competitive advantage do you have with AI?

Just like railroads, telephones and internal combustion engines all having their moment as they were being built into the fabric of commerce.

AI is today’s “It Girl.”

Strategically, new technologies become the cost of doing business.

It’s no surprise.

Just like every technology come before, AI is becoming a commodity.

It reminds me of the amount of money thrown at IT in the 90’s.

As experts pointed out then – the 1990’s over investment in information technology echoed the over investment in railroads in the 1860s.

In both cases, companies and individuals, dazzled by the unlimited commercial possibilities of the technologies, threw insane money away on half-baked business ideas.

After the turn of the century, business leaders seemed to focus technology on specific problems.

And the solutions have been beneficial.

• ecommerce

• open-source

• mobile

• cloud

• wifi

• big data

• blockchain

• AI

All expected today thanks to the internet railroad.

Differentiation

I thought we were helping create digital transformation with internet development in the 90’s.

I was wrong.

Most of my clients were just web enabling their existing business. They were not transforming at all.

But the leaders were.

• Who thought we might need a search engine of all the digital storefronts?

• Who thought we would need online banking when we had ATM’s on every corner?

• Who thought we could need same day delivery when modems were standard?

• Who thought we would buy online books when Borders was in every suburb?

• Who thought we might need a super computer in our pocket?

The leaders differentiated their companies with the application of new technology to unseen problems.

They did the hard work of social engineering - thinking about how customers would prefer to do business once the rails were down.

Leveraging new technology to sometimes create a new sector.

And the same will happen to the next cool tech thing too.

Forward-looking entrepreneurs can gain real advantages when they apply new technology with unique knowledge.

Just putting your current processes into the latest thing is NOT the change you want to be.

The future source of competitive advantage for most companies lies in the proprietary knowledge that will fuel new solutions.

Who is training the AI how to do the jobs only you know how to do?

Look in the mirror.

Humans win the long game.

Now go launch something 🚀 

Modern Tools

So, besides the low-hanging fruit of marketing content, where can AI make a difference in a small business?

How about improving customer self-service mitigating the need to add staff?

No code your way to improved customer service by building your own chatbot.

Raise the quality of calls the humans take.

Old School Wisdom

Spoiler alert: Al Gore didn’t invent the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee did.

And he gave it away only to see it be bastardized by today’s data pirates.

Here’s a 1997 BBC interview with Tim Berners-Lee warning us that the internet could divide us.

Free Knowledge

You know what is in short supply?

Making good decisions.

Seven Deadly Stupidities provides real-life examples via blog and newsletter that will help improve your decision making by removing bias, unnecessary information, and emotion from your process.

Recommended by Guy Kawasaki, use your smarts to make even better decisions.

Recommendations

Visual Crapshoot

1  IT Doesn’t Matter - https://www.classes.cs.uchicago.edu/archive/2014/fall/51210-1/required.reading/ITDoesntMatter.pdf