Building Products for the AI-Native Future

Preparing for the ubiquity of artificial intelligence

At this point in history, we find ourselves living in the ever-changing world, and this change is primarily being driven by technology. It’s never been more important in supporting the global economy; in fact, many of the world’s top companies are technology companies (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, and Samsung Electronics).

Other companies and businesses also heavily rely on technology even though the industries in which they operate aren’t directly related to it. As a result, they become customers in businesses that supply digital products that allow them to enhance their operations and increase profits.

In recent years, producers of digital products have experienced profound changes. Previously, they had to build cloud-native and mobile-native products because they were the most important things in technology. Today, however, the things have changed.

Right now, the most important and disruptive force in technology is artificial intelligence (AI). Everything that digital agencies and other technology companies learned with cloud and mobile has served a critical purpose: to prepare us for the AI-based future.

Why Prepare Now?

There are many reasons to believe that we’re on the verge of a major explosion in the AI industry. AI has already arrived, and for real this time. Businesses around the world are taking advantage of AI-based products and solutions.

For example, let’s take logistics companies as an example. A recent white paper by DHL described that only 10 percent of current logistics systems, data, and interactions include elements of AI analysis, but the industry is to rapidly increase the adoption of machine learning and other AI technology.

Some of the most impactful AI technology for logistics companies identified in the report include:

• Automation of customer support by chatbots (by 2020, the majority of commercial interactions will take place between customers and virtual agents)
• Content discovery through a sophisticated automatic analysis of unstructured data such as audio, video, PDFs, emails, and pictures
• Autonomous transportation (AI algorithms enable a vehicle to follow another vehicle driven by a human and identify obstacles on the road)
• Predictive logistics to forecast air freight, transit delay, and other important parameters
• Intelligent route optimization to improve transportation, pick up, and delivery
• Intelligent robot sorting to enable a more efficient warehouse management.

Impressive, right?

Eventually, developing and building AI-native software that helps businesses will facilitate the demand for talent and experience with deep learning, machine learning, and other AI technology. Many companies will have to collaborate with digital agencies to build, implement, and evolve AI-native software.

To meet the needs of customers, developers of AI-native software will have to have a good understanding of the features of these products and the trends they will create. Here’s a quick rundown of these features and trends.

1. AI-Based Products Will Have a Different Matrix for Success

Right now, companies measure the success of a product by evaluating whether it delivered an outcome that delighted its users. For example, a software product has the same user actions that result in the same response expected by the developer.

AI-based products, however, will have different product metrics. For example, a system learning customer preferences will produce different results after learning some extra preferences of the users. As the result, such analysis features as probability and statistical terms may be introduced to measure product metrics, and ultimately, success.

2. AI-Based Products Will Become More User-Friendly

Typically, as technology has advanced, humans have adapted to computers. AI has finally turned it the other way around thanks to machine learning. One of the best examples of products becoming easier to use is AI-powered voice search. Essentially, it’s a conversation with a device that’s much easier than typing queries on a keyboard.

And people love it! The increasing popularity of voice search fueled by personal assistants such as Siri and Amazon Echo has urged online businesses to optimize for it. For example, reputable online resources such as Forbes say that voice search optimization “is more important than ever” because Google is also changing its algorithms to meet the needs of those using voice to search. Digital marketing experts predict that 50 percent of all web searches will be voice-based by 2020.

3. AI-Based Products Will Make Users More Capable

AI-based products have another significant difference from traditional digital products: they will be much more autonomous and require minimum effort to achieve a goal. One of the simplest examples is Microsoft’s SwiftKey, which learns the user’s preferences and typing habits and predicts what they’re about to type and corrects what they already did.

Helpful Tools for Developers of AI-Native Products

• Google AI. A collaborative platform built by Google to provide tools, exercises, and open sources projects for anyone interested in learning AI.
• A-Writer. This tool offers quality proofreading and suggestions to advance a writer’s style and tone.
• Stackla. An AI-powered tool designed to help businesses find, manage, and display the most popular user-generated content across marketing touchpoints.
• Phrasee. If you need an AI-based tool to automate your marketing, check out Phrasee. It specializes in language generation for marketing copies for social media, emails, other tools.

Final Thoughts

AI-native future is closer than many people think, so now’s a great time to embrace it. The next generation of AI products will emerge fast because of ever-changing business conditions and customer requirements, so having a reliable digital agency as a partner will be paramount for many companies. Hopefully this article is persuasive enough so you begin your way in the development of awesome AI-native products that your customers will fall in love with.

Written by: Lucy Benton

Lucy is a visual content and digital marketing specialist who finds her passion in expressing own thoughts as a blogger and currently works at college paper writing service. She is a tech-savvy person and likes to write on different topics like social media, web design, mobile apps, online marketing and much more.