How AI Is Changing Innovation: Why Speed Alone Isn’t a Strategy

Adi Ignatius (0:02)

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I'm Adi Ignatius.

Alison Beard (0:48)

I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Adi Ignatius (0:59)

So, Alison, we are at week three of our special series on AI, and after diving deep on talent and communication, we are looking today at innovation.

Alison Beard (1:08)

I'm excited about this one because there's no question that generative AI is itself the most important technological innovation we've seen in decades, maybe our lifetimes, and that it's super charging innovation in every other realm of business from cancer treatments to space exploration. But I guess there's still a question if all of the innovation is that impressive or differentiating when everyone has access to the same tools.

Adi Ignatius (1:33)

Yeah, so that's a great question. Look, I'm still trying to understand what an AI-powered company really is, how the technology can create not just efficiencies, but can transform businesses and allow them to innovate at a scale that would have once been unimaginable. So to help explain all of this, our guest today is Jeetu Patel, who is leading AI Strategy at Cisco, company that is helping to build the infrastructure for the AI era. He has a lot to say about how AI can help drive innovation and how companies need to think about processes, about security, and about preserving human qualities like judgment. Here's our conversation.

AI is dramatically reducing the time and the cost required to build, test, iterate on ideas. You know, in your mind, does that fundamentally change what innovation is? You know, from a scarce activity to something that we should think about as almost continuous.

Jeetu Patel (2:31)

When there's an element of abundance where you can actually start thinking and prosecuting ideas at a very fast pace, the rationing that you have to do is making sure that you don't create slops. In a world where you can write unlimited amounts of code, choosing what not to build is actually a far more important decision than deciding what to build. And from that perspective, I do feel like the need for exercising human judgment and taste and intuition and instinct is actually more important now than ever before. And so I always find it interesting when people say, well, you know, all humans are going to lose their jobs and we're not going to have anything to do.

I just don't even understand that because there's going to be so many areas where human instinct is going to be more required than less as we move forward.

Adi Ignatius (3:21)

Well, let's talk about processes a little bit because our companies have spent decades creating and perfecting this whole process for innovation, roadmaps, planning, approval processes. Which of these processes should become obsolete when you can go from an idea to a prototype in hours and minutes instead of months?

Jeetu Patel (3:41)

The way that I think about processes in general is you have to be not pedantic about the process, and you have to be far more intellectually honest about the level of rigor that is done to go out and drive to a certain outcome and that you're sweating the details. Let me give you a very simple example. Have you seen someone create a PowerPoint in Claude or OpenAI and then start to present it to you?

I find those to be less effective than when someone has actually taken the time to build the PowerPoint. Something must happen in the human brain where people are so eager on hitting send without actually going through and saying, is there thoughtful analysis done? Is the point being made in the right way? What I found is the quality of conversations were starting to go down because even the people who had authored the document weren't the ones who were intimately familiar with every single concept in the document because they were just regurgitating what someone else had created.

I think that's a bad way to do things. The goal of AI is to not degrade our thinking, but to enhance our thinking and allow us to think at a broader and higher aperture than what we were able to do before. And I don't think that that's something that we have to adjust it to. The most important thing we need to do is can we just improve? If there were three things that we were doing in a day, sure, one thing is that I can do ten things in a day, but that doesn't really change the world as much as saying those three things that I'm doing, can I do them 100x better than what I was doing before? And that would actually create a much better outcome. We're moving from chatbots to these agents that can intelligently answer our questions and conduct tasks and jobs for us almost fully autonomously.