Opportunity

In the rush to incorporating AI into our work, I think we’ve missed an important question: Which type of work should AI do?

Every business—but DTC brands especially—have to weigh opportunity costs. In smaller brands, for instance, it’s fairly common to focus exclusively on acquisition. After all, there are so few customers to retain that any business value you might gain from that is going to be marginal. Spending time on retention could, in fact, seem wasteful, because it takes away from time that could be spent on something higher value.

You could see this calculus changing, though, when AI can think about—and do—the work for you.

Even if those early retention gains are marginal, if you don’t have to do the work (much less think about the work), why wouldn’t you take them? It would almost feel wasteful not to.

This is the piece I think we’re missing: AI will very often flip on its head the calculus of whether work should get done. If that’s the case, more work will get done.

This, then, poses the question: Which work should AI do?

There are a few potential answers:

• AI does the work that delivers the highest confirmed ROI, because it is obvious that work needs to get done.

• AI does the work that delivers the highest speculative ROI, because the business agrees it is work that should be done—but it doesn’t have confirmation that the work will deliver value.

• AI does the work that delivers low, but confirmed ROI, because this is work that is not currently being done and—when added up—will deliver meaningful incremental gains to the business.

Sitting here today, I don’t think you could say any of these choices are bad or wrong. The choice is probably more a reflection of how much you trust AI to do the work today than which work you want to do.

Because, in reality, if you trust AI to do some work, you’ll start doing all of this work—which is different from the way most businesses operate today. That’s a big change.

But the specifics around execution will be interesting to watch.