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

HBR IdeaCast

This episode explores how generative AI is fundamentally altering the landscape of business innovation by reducing the time and cost of prototyping.

Key takeaways

• Jeetu Patel argues that because AI makes it easy to create, the most important skill shifts from deciding what to build to deciding what NOT to build to avoid 'slop'.
• The evolution of AI is moving from simple chatbots to autonomous agents like Rockbot and Muse that can act as digital coworkers.
• Security for AI agents requires runtime monitoring and guardrails, with Patel comparing the management of intelligent agents to parenting teenagers.
• Cisco demonstrated extreme speed by compressing a multi-year infrastructure project into just nine months using AI-driven development.
• The primary bottleneck in innovation is shifting from the ability to write code to the ability to review code and exercise strategic decision-making.

Main topics

• AI-driven innovation speed
• Human judgment and taste
• Security and governance of AI agents

Notable quotes

Choosing what not to build is actually a far more important decision than deciding what to build.

Conclusion

While AI provides unprecedented speed in execution, true strategic val

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) This podcast is sponsored by Dataiku Agent Management. Enterprises have a system for tracking and approving the software they use. But when it comes to AI agents, most of them can't say the same. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool, showing what's driving revenue, what's drifted, and who signed off on it. Visit dataiku.com slash HBR. D-A-T-A-I-K-U dot com slash HBR. Speaker 3 (0:47) I'm Avi Ignatius. Speaker 2 (0:48) I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. Speaker 3 (0:58) So Allison, 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. I'm Speaker 2 (1:08) 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 supercharging 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. Speaker 3 (1:33) Yeah, so that's a great question. Look, I'm still trying to understand what an AI-powered company really is and 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, my guest today is Jitu Patel, who's leading AI strategy at Cisco, a 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. Speaker 3 (2:14) 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. Speaker 1 (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 slop. 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. Speaker 3 (3:21) Well, let's talk about processes a little bit because our company 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, in minutes, instead of months? Speaker 1 (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. Speaker 2 (3:59) Let me give you a very simple example. Speaker 1 (4:01) Have you seen someone Speaker 3 (4:02) create a PowerPoint in Speaker 1 (4:04) Cloud or OpenAI and then start to present it to you? Yes. 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 was starting to go down because even the people who had authored the the document weren't the ones who were intimately familiar with every single concept in the document because they were just kind of 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 adjusted 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 I can do 10 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. But it was very hard to go out and use agents. What is now starting to happen is these personal agents like Rockbot, Muse, and Instinct. are going to democratize that quite dramatically. And if you leave aside the fear on safety and security, which we should talk about, and if you said, I can enrich those agents with the ultimate amount of context about me, can that agent really, in a meaningful way, lower my burden and help me out and actually make me feel like I can produce better quality thinking for myself because of the agent aiding me? I think the answer is categorically yes. And that is an area that I feel is going to be the next very exciting phase in AI, is these personal agents that we're using. That'll then bleed into the business agents as well. Speaker 3 (6:21) You know, at this point, is AI generally for companies, for teams, you know, still essentially making things more efficient? Or is it changing the kinds of problems that we can choose to tackle? I mean, you know, is AI changing how we even think about problems we can solve. Speaker 1 (6:38) I think that's the more interesting part rather than the efficiency part. The efficiency will come, but the thing that is truly the force multiplier is original insights that get generated by AI that you would have never been able to generate without it that then allow you to expand your thinking and your perspectives. And then that allows you to have the ambition and the credibility to be able to solve problems that you could never even dream of solving before. Especially in the United States, we've gotten very negative on the narrative on AI. And I actually don't like that because I think this is a tremendous technology that can really help in solving problems across a multitude of dimensions that are going to be really great. And we should also, of course, be focused on mitigating the risk. Constant level of negativity around AI, I don't think is accurately reflective of the potential of the technology. We are using AI now more than any time before in our history. 32,000 engineers are coding with AI. We will actually, by the end of next year, have 70 %