This is a translation of today’s post from Serge Faguet. I found his take useful for the purpose of better understanding of what “AI-first” business really means. Not the ultimate answer, rather one of the opinions and we will keep posting the opinion of different entrepreneurs, founders and executives on this to obtain a full picture.
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“AI-first” means that the very design of the business concept took into account the capabilities of AI, that is, you are not transforming an old business but creating a new one from scratch, which would be impossible without AI.
Here is a story from biotech
Cancer is a disease that can often be quite linearly correlated with one specific gene – for example, breast cancer and the BRCA gene
But diseases associated with the cardiovascular system and everything related to the so-called metabolic syndrome are super multifactorial and even the most significant factors in biochemical analyses explain <5% of the development of any disease
There is no biomarker that would qualitatively show the dynamics of disease development or the success of a specific intervention
4 years ago, I co-founded and invested $250,000 in seedround AI drug discovery, a company that had an AI-first idea – to partner with hospitals that have stored blood of patients and their medical history, to do a large number of tests for this (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics) with the hypothesis that it will be possible to make a high-dimensional fingerprint and from a huge volume of indicators find the combination that predicts how various diseases will develop
And we succeeded, although it was very difficult on many levels – a couple of weeks ago they announced the first major pharmaceutical deal
In fact, we found combinations of complex biomarkers that predict in which direction various chronic kidney diseases develop and, based on this IP, launched a business that develops drugs in this area, and we will launch many such businesses from the same datasets
I think the company will be even bigger than Ostrovok 😉 (the previous successful exit of the author)
This is an AI-first business since the data arrays with which we work there, in principle, cannot be processed without AI
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Where will startups win, and where are the existing players?
A startup has an advantage in reinventing the business model
An existing player has the advantage of having data
Startups and existing businesses can’t partner with each other on this, corporate venture studios don’t work
The ultimate answer is that existing players who can reinvent the business based on their data have the highest chance of success, but only a few can
This is difficult due to human factors – the business already exists, it works and people in it are used to working in a certain way, the team structure is formed, and everyone has a lot of ego
The only thing that solves these issues is the willpower and leadership qualities of the owners or CEO of the business who understand that this is the only way to make this business successful
If this applies to you, then a framework for a complete AI-first transformation or simply accelerating the creation of an AI culture
(1) become yourself or find a leader for this transformation who understands technology and understands business at the CEO/BoD level
(2) study all aspects of the business thoroughly at the data level
(3) collect an inspiring vision of what this business looks like after transformations, sell the vision to key people
(4) find the first simple victories that show real results so that everyone believes
(5) dig into all the details yourself because you like it – I personally just love finding insights in numbers, it gives intellectual pleasure