The AI use case doom loop

It isn’t about the technology. It’s about the business culture it collides with.

I remember quite a distinct period of time, maybe a decade ago, when at least once a day someone from a broadband company would knock on your door.

They were, in a variety of ways, trying to encourage you to switch providers.

And of course the more it happened, the more you started trying to avoid them. You’d hide. You’d pretend you were in the middle of dinner. If they phoned, you might put on an accent and pretend they had the wrong number (at least that’s what I did).

As someone who spends a lot of time talking to retailers and brands, I can tell you that they feel about AI the way we all used to feel about broadband providers.

They’ve started to hide, or come up with elaborate lies to avoid talking to people selling AI solutions.

If you’re a retail tech company pushing AI, this, self-evidently, is not good.

And at the heart of the problem is what I’m calling the AI doom loop.

Show me the brands

I’m not going to dig into the nuances of AI in retail, where it’s used already, where it isn’t - and why even just using the vague term AI is a bit ridiculous for something that was first discussed in the mid-1950s.

For the purposes of this article, when I say AI I’m talking about any number of AI focused tech solutions and start-ups who are aggressively selling their ideas to retailers on the promise of transformational change.

They could be everything from a company that uses AI to create virtual models for fashion brands, through to a company that uses AI to minimise waste in a grocery store.

The start point for these companies is largely positive. The investment is there, and that money fuels demos at conferences, snazzy marketing, webinars, dinner events, email campaigns and everything in between.

So far, so good - the world can see they exist and what they do.

Thereafter, the doom loop begins as soon as the retailer asks for use cases - because they’re normally theoretical or tangential.

The retailers do what they’ve always done (and I’m not necessarily celebrating this): they look for security in the form of other brands they recognise who’ve invested in this thing.

Because that’s what the CFO will ask for. Who else uses this?

Patience, please

I’m not an expert in AI.

But having spent the last 15 years with senior retail leaders from all over the world, often during events, tours, dinners and drinks when they’re at their most casual and unguarded, I do feel like I have a solid sense of the culture among senior retail teams.

And here’s my big take on that: the culture is incredibly similar now to how it was 15 years ago.

While the world might feel like it’s changing rapidly, among most big retailers it’s changing slowly. The same kinds of people are in charge, and they’re often in charge not because of their knowledge of what’s happening outside of their business, but because of what’s happening inside.

When tech start-ups focused on AI collide with this culture, it’s a mismatch. The start-up runs in shouting that the world is changing faster than the retailer can comprehend. Blink and they will miss it.

And the retailer shrugs, goes back to the office, and the world looks remarkably similar.

It isn’t hard to imagine how tech companies, viewed through this lens, start to struggle to cut through.

It isn’t about the technology. The technology is remarkable. We’ve all seen it now - it’s nuts.

It’s about the business culture it collides with.

Evidently, many of these solutions need clients quickly because investors are losing patience.

But I fear that patience is entirely necessary here. Retailers, especially legacy, store focused ones aren’t going to just yield to energetic promises or fears of being left behind in a rapidly changing world.

Because senior teams have been here before. They get told the world is changing faster than their business can handle every couple of years. But a couple of years later, they’re still here - despite not really doing what the tech company told them to do.

And if that keeps happening, guess what? Their resolve to not adopt your solution rapidly is strengthened.

For some of the retailers I know well, I can promise you - you could show them clear evidence that their entire business will collapse in weeks if they don’t adopt your technology today, and they’ll still arrange a series of meetings over the next couple of months internally. Just to discuss your proposal before even coming back.

They’re busy, and they feel like they’ve seen it all before.

You need meaty use cases that you can share. Then they’ll start talking. And those talks will last ages, as will the final decisions.

My advice here is simple: retailers aren’t always going to speed up for you, so you might have to slow down for them.