Harnessing Generative AI in Business, The Rise of Strategic UX Research, and Top UX Writing Tips for 2024

A weekly round-up — 3 discoveries, 1 reflection and a quote worth remembering in the innovation & design space—for leaders invested in digital transformation.

By Maish Nichani

#1 Generative AI in the Enterprise

This is an excellent report on the state of AI in the enterprise. So, what are the factors holding back AI adoption? Surprise, the top factor is “identifying appropriate business use cases”.

Let’s take another perspective on the graph above. Which factors are exploratory, and which ones are executionary in nature? The top three factors which require the most minor monetary investments are exploratory - you are just figuring things out. The remaining factors, like skills, data, and infrastructure, require significant monetary investments. Why aren’t even exploratory actions taken, then? It’s the leadership. There seems to be some leadership paralysis when it comes to AI. The IMD business school has a good advise for CEO’s:

1. Encourage functional and business leaders to explore generative AI.
2. Ensure connected use of AI.
3. Encourage senior executives to undertake formal generative AI training.

We at PebbleRoad are also here to help: check out our AI opportunities sprint to explore business opportunities.

#2 Strategic UX Research is the next big thing

There are times to be strategic and times to be tactical. The problem arises when leaders confuse the two. Jared Spool nicely describes in this article on strategic UX research that strategy is about answering the question: “Are we solving the right problem? Are we building the right solution?” Tactical UX research, on the other hand, focuses on steps to ‘build the thing right’, such as improving an interface or doing a survey to understand the experience. The area we stumble onto quite often is when a tactical UX research project sheds light on bigger things and calls for more strategic UX research. For example, a project looking for sources of negative customer feedback reveals cracks in the entire supply chain. Such findings shift the focus on the leader - will they pursue to find the truth or agree to put lipstick on a pig? We have been lucky to work with leaders of the former category.

#3 Nine Simple But Powerful UX Writing Tips for Designers in 2024

Writing is designing. People read on websites and apps, and their reading experience defines their overall experience. These nine tips can go a long way in creating fluent experiences. You can also check out PebbleRoad’s article on how to write for humans and machines.

Internal reflections

Knowing how some things come into being helps us understand how they evolve. I chanced upon Fei-Fei Li 's book, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. In this book, Dr Li weaves two stories together, one of her struggles with immigrating to the US from China and pursuing her studies and the other pushing the frontiers of machine intelligence. Understanding the origin story of ImageNet and how it sparked the neural networks frenzy that has given us ChatGPT is humbling. I now appreciate the magnitude of change AI can unleash and how it marks a significant moment in human civilisation.

Quote worth remembering

"I believe in the future of AI changing the world. The question is, who is changing AI? It is really important to bring diverse groups of students and future leaders into the development of AI.”

Dr Fei-Fei Li on the need for closer collaboration on AI development.