AI in Product Development: Leveraging The New Age of Innovation

You’ve seen AI take over the headlines this year. It’s in the news, it’s in your inbox, it’s even in your toothbrush. (Yes, OralB now uses AI in their latest toothbrush). 

Companies like Amazon and Google have used AI in product development for years. Now, similar technologies are accessible to everyone with tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney. 

RELATED: AI in Business: How to Find the Right Tools to Make Selling on Amazon Easier

The question isn’t whether to adopt AI technology, but how to do it effectively. Those who embrace it will lead the future, while those who resist will be playing catch up.

Are you ready to take advantage?

‍Note: Quotes in this article are from the Alibaba.com Co-Create 2023 event panel: How AI Revolutionizes Product Development and Manufacturing.

Supercharging Innovation in Product Development

AI helps you innovate faster and more efficiently. In a flash, you can analyze customer data, market information, and competitor content. One person can now review thousands of words in seconds when it would have taken hours just a year ago. 

“Find inspiration, visualize new products, and work with your supplier to make it happen.”  – Amy Wees, Founder, Amazing at Home

With these innovations in machine learning introduced in a user-friendly chat format, the average person–or business with a less formidable bottom line than Microsoft or IBM –now has full access to the power of AI. 

Here are a few benefits of using AI to speed up product development. 

Benefits of AI in Product Development

• Faster time-to-market: AI helps streamline your processes and allows you to launch quicker. 
• Improved product experience: AI insights lead to better ideas, content, and designs throughout the development cycle. 
• Reduce human errors: AI helps you keep a consistent quality across the entire product development life cycle. 
• Time and cost savings: You can now automate basic tasks– writing email replies, rewriting, translation, proofreading, and more–to save time and money. 

“Does anyone want to do things the ‘hard way’? One of the coolest things about AI is that it lets us hit the ‘easy’ button” – Brian Williams, Ecommerce Expert

How AI Helps Launch Products Faster

AI makes all your processes faster and easier to manage. You can automate repetitive tasks, analyze massive amounts of data in seconds, and create expertly written copy in minutes. 

“Use AI with excitement and fervor. If your competition does not move at the speed of light, you will crush them.” – Brandon Young

With stable diffusion (a text-to-image machine learning technology), tools like Midjourney allow you to create professional product photos and graphics with a simple text prompt. 

From product discovery, business plan generation, design, and development, AI can help reduce the time spent on manual tasks and trial-and-error and help you launch more products faster than before. 

AI Tool Recommendations

Instant thought organization anytime you need: This is why AI is perfect for the busy business owner constantly trying to optimize product development's thinking and planning phase. 

Think of generative AI as a supercar for your racing entrepreneurial thoughts. Just dump your thought process into ChatGPT and ask it to clean up your messy thoughts. 

But not all AI tools are created alike. Learning how they all work – and how they work with each other – is the key to success when deciding to commit resources to using  this new technology. Here are a few of the most popular ones. 

3 Popular AI Tools for Product Development

1. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the AI tool that kick-started the craze in 2023. It skyrocketed to 100 million users and is used in almost every industry. Now, GPT4 (the latest paid iteration of the service)  includes plugins that allow you to access the internet, create diagrams, read PDFs, and more. 

Almost all the new AI tools on the market integrate with ChatGPT. It’s the AI engine that powers most of the tools out there. PixelMe by Carbon6, forexample, allows you to use ChatGPT to auto-generate SEO-optimized headlines and descriptions for Amazon product listings. 

2. Midjourney

But it’s not all about text. You can now create incredible photorealistic product photographs using Midjourney. Use these as inspiration for taking the perfect shot yourself, or use them as they are. 

The key is to use a detailed prompt to get Midjourney to produce the best results. And don’t be afraid to iterate! Keep refining prompts until you get the outputs you need. 

Example Prompt: Eye-level Commercial film photography of a black foam roller, sunny summer day, packshot, focus, depth of field, shot on 120mm, shot on Hasselblad, sharp focus, --v 5.2 --ar 16:9

“Imagine designing better products 100x faster and 100x cheaper. Now imagine validating those designs against competitors before you spend a single penny on product development.”— Brian Williams

 3. Claude

Claude is a similar product to ChatGPT, allowing much larger text inputs and more detailed outputs than ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, Claude is not limited in its dataset to events preceding 2021 and is connected to the internet. Especially for users not ready to move to the paid version of ChatGPT (GPT4), Claude represents an avenue for exploring more robust AI features. Warning: Claude likes to hallucinate more than ChatGPT. Take its creations with a dash of salt and always fact-check. 

RELATED: Learn more about using AI to speed up your product development strategy in this 6 Minutes with Carbon6 interview.

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“If you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is going to disrupt you.” — Brandon Young

Every jump in technological advancement brings a fresh wave of innovation. There was the printing press, the birth of the internet, and the rise of smartphones. Now, AI gives us another leap forward in technology. 

For example, Tim Jordan reports in this week's Legion Newsletter that Amazon is upgrading its customer review experience with generative AI. According to Amazon's official update, this AI-driven feature summarizes customer reviews on the product page, emphasizing product attributes and top sentiments to make it easier for shoppers to quickly get the main theme of reviews at a glance.

You’ll constantly surprise yourself with what’s possible. With a flash of imagination and a splash of creativity, you’ll use AI to optimize every part of your product development process.