Some people believe technology is the only way to innovate. It’s not. There are many ways to innovate. Consider the innovation radar MIT published over a decade ago; it can help companies identify opportunities to innovate across 12 dimensions: offerings, platform, solutions, customers, customer experience, value capture, processes, organization, supply chain, presence, networking, and brand.
Technology is rarely the innovation itself. Technology changes what is possible. Innovation is what you redesign because those possibilities changed. That distinction matters enormously with AI. AI doesn’t merely create an opportunity to build AI products. It changes the constraints underneath almost every one of those dimensions.
For example:
- Customer experience: What if every customer had an intelligent concierge that understood their history, preferences, context, and intent?
- Value capture/business model: What if you stopped charging for seats, hours, or transactions and charged for outcomes instead?
- Organization: What if the company could operate with dramatically fewer layers of coordination because intelligence was distributed everywhere?
- Process: What if a workflow wasn’t automated, but eliminated entirely?
- Solutions: What if you stopped selling a product and started guaranteeing the customer’s desired result?
- Customers: What markets suddenly become economically viable because serving tiny customer segments becomes nearly free?
- Presence: What does distribution look like when an AI agent can sell, onboard, support, and serve customers 24/7 in dozens of languages?
That is much more consequential than asking, “Where can we add AI?”
For me, the most powerful areas of innovation are business model, customer experience, and organization/management. They sit at the highest-leverage layer.
- Business model innovation changes how value is created and captured.
- Customer-experience innovation changes what customers feel, expect, and can do.
- Organizational/management innovation changes the machine that produces everything else.
And that last one may be the most underexplored opportunity created by AI.
Companies are currently obsessed with applying AI inside the existing organization: copilots for employees, agents for workflows, automation for departments.
But there is a more provocative question is: If AI had always existed, would we have designed the company this way in the first place?
Would we still have the same departments? Same hierarchy? Same management layers? Same meetings? Same approval processes? Same job descriptions? Same planning cycles? Probably not.
This is what happens with every major technological wave.
The internet wasn’t just websites. It gave us Amazon’s retail model, Google’s advertising model, Netflix’s distribution model, Airbnb’s marketplace model, remote work, direct-to-consumer brands, SaaS, social networks, and countless organizational changes. Smartphones weren’t just smaller computers. They changed transportation, photography, banking, dating, travel, retail, entertainment, payments, communication, and how companies interact with customers.
AI should be viewed the same way.
Whenever a major technological wave arrives, it doesn’t create one category of innovation. It unlocks all the others. AI innovation isn’t a category of innovation. AI is an unlock for every category of innovation.
The companies that understand this will do more than use AI to improve what already exists. They’ll use it to question what should exist at all.
Bottom line: Every major technology wave creates a much larger innovation wave around it. The technology gets the attention, but the biggest opportunities often come from redesigning the business models, customer experiences, organizations, and behaviors that the old technological constraints created.
