The Impact of Consequential AI: Beyond the Co-Pilot
From AI noise to business outcomes.
We’re surrounded by AI advancements that promise to change nearly every facet of how we live and work. Every week, new announcements showcase innovations, pushing AI further into the fabric of our daily lives. Yet, in the commerce sector, we face a unique challenge: with high capital costs and an endless stream of AI-driven “noise,” it’s tough to discern which advancements will genuinely drive growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and employee efficiency.
This is only going to become more challenging as the cost of model inference declines and AI becomes more widely accessible For context, consider electricity, which went from being an expensive, specialized tool to a universally accessible utility. AI is on a similar path. As companies like Google and NVIDIA push forward with advancements, AI will become less expensive to develop and deploy, democratizing access for all.
So as AI becomes more ubiquitous, as the “noise” grows louder, how do you find the solutions that will actually help you create value?
Not all AI is created equal, and while there are many promises, only a subset of these innovations will truly impact business in a meaningful way. This brings us to a pivotal concept: Consequential AI.
The idea of consequential AI hinges on an AI application’s ability to deliver meaningful outcomes against core assessment criteria. AI for the sake of AI will always be a waste of time, money, and effort, which is why being able to identify which AI applications are consequential can provide us with a roadmap for investments with genuine impact.
What Makes AI Consequential?
When evaluating the potential of AI, I believe that truly consequential AI should meet at least two, if not all three, of the following criteria:
- Medium-Term Impact on Key Metrics: To justify investment, an AI initiative should have the capacity to improve a key business metric by at least 10%. This impact may not be immediate, but as a medium-term investment, it should be capable of driving measurable change.
- Differentiated Customer Experience: AI should create a customer experience that significantly elevates your brand above others. This is about more than convenience; it’s about differentiating your experience so much so that a customer would prefer your brand over another.
- Profound Impact on Productivity: AI needs to fundamentally change the productivity of the team by at least 2X over a medium-term period. When AI can do this, it shifts the business from incremental improvement to substantial transformation.
Moving from Co-Pilot to Pilot
Many AI innovations to date have been framed as “co-pilots”— tools that assist us in tasks but don’t fundamentally shift the way we operate. They provide support, automate certain steps, and may make some jobs a little easier. While useful, these tools don’t offer the substantial, transformational impact needed to sway a CFO or create seismic shifts in a company’s trajectory. Co-pilot AIs can generate emails, create images, or summarize documents— helpful, yes, but they don’t move the needle in the way we need.
To make AI truly impactful in commerce, we need AI as a “pilot”— an autonomous agent that can independently execute tasks. Imagine AI that doesn’t just generate content ideas for marketing, but one that optimizes campaign strategies in real-time, creating ads, choosing optimal channels, and setting budgets.
It’s even easier to imagine this shift to AI as the pilot in areas that many of us experience ourselves as consumers. In customer service, we could see AI pilots that go beyond answering basic queries in automated tones to handling returns, order tracking, and providing real-time order customization options — all through conversational exchanges that could even adapt to different languages or inflections.
When AI acts as the pilot, we have the opportunity to reimagine the roles within our organizations. We become air traffic controllers, focused on optimizing an entire flight field rather than flying one plane. We move from routine tasks to higher-order roles, managing strategy, creativity, and decision-making. Isn’t that a future we could all benefit from?
Balancing AI Noise and Business Outcomes
For businesses, the challenge in the coming years will be navigating between the hype of AI and its real, actionable potential. Each organization will need to approach AI investments with a clear focus on consequential outcomes – investments that can bring about real, measurable impact over time. This will require a deliberate approach, one of continuous experimentation, thoughtful training, and a commitment to gradual adoption.
As we step further into this AI-driven world, the opportunity lies in choosing the tools and strategies that genuinely add value. By focusing on consequential AI, we can ensure that our investments not only enhance our businesses but also create lasting, meaningful change for our customers and teams.
Raj De Datta
CEO & Co-Founder, Bloomreach
Raj De Datta is co-founder and CEO of Bloomreach. Prior, he held roles at Mohr-Davidow Ventures and Cisco, and was on the founding team of FirstMark Communications. Raj is also a Founder Partner at seed-stage VC firm Founder Collective. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering with a certificate in Public Policy and International affairs from Princeton University and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.