AI and the Innovator’s Dilemma
The Innovator’s Dilemma is a classic book on business by Clayton Christensen, a professor of business at Harvard. First published in 1997, Christensen described how companies could be making logical, money-making decisions and still fail when new technology (often developed by the same company) overtakes their core business and makes them obsolete. He describes how new technologies in the beginning often don’t work as well as what already exists.
For example, digital cameras were invented in the labs of Eastman Kodak, of Kodak film, in the 1970s. They didn’t work as well as the film cameras that Kodak already sold, producing inferior photographs. And, every person who switched over to a digital camera was no longer buying film from Kodak. It probably seemed like an easy decision to set aside the digital camera in favor of Kodak’s core business. But technology improves quickly and sometimes cheaper convenience beats expensive quality. Kodak went bankrupt in 2012.
Our experience with generative AI over the last year suggests that we’re at the beginning of a similar period for knowledge workers. It’s easy right now to laugh at how much AI tools can get wrong. Glue to hold cheese on pizza is the most recent joke out of Google’s AI enhanced search. I’m sure Google is struggling right now with how to keep AI from cannibalizing their core ad business. But if they aren’t willing to give up some near-term profits to pursue long-term stability, they may go the way of Kodak, as unthinkable as that is at this moment.
A similar dynamic will soon play out in the NEPA world. The basic models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and others are not world-changing tools for NEPA compliance right now. In fact, if you work just with those models, you may well spend more time trying to craft the perfect prompt than you would just writing out that EIS section the old-fashioned way. Here at Oak Canyon AI, our goal is to make the use of AI more intuitive, more accurate, and more profitable.
Some companies will be tempted to ignore the changes that generative AI is promising to our industry. They’ve done things a certain way for 10 or 20 or 30 years and it’s good enough for their clients, right? While that may be possible for a year or two, companies that stick their heads in the sand are setting themselves up to be replaced when the tools improve. The quality of your work or your relationships with your clients may be able to insulate you when AI provides a 10% increase in productivity to your competitors (as Oak Canyon AI’s tools will now). What will you do when they can charge 25% less and finish the project 25% faster? Or 50%?
Don’t let innovation pass you by. Reach out to us today to learn about Oak Canyon’s AI tools that can increase your productivity, keep you competitive, and prepare your business for the future.
