The AI Dilemma For Entrepreneurs: Pivot Now Or Wait It Out?

In November 2022 Chat GPT made artificial intelligence widely accessible to entrepreneurs, arguably for the first time. What followed was a wave of business owners figuring out how they could use AI to save time, ramp up production, make more money and stand out in their field.

The bandwagon followed the buzz resulting in new tools launching on an hourly basis. After that came a feeling of disillusionment in users as the reality didn’t live up to the hype and the sales pages were found to have overpromised. You might be left wondering, is now the time to get involved in AI, or should you hang back and wait a while?

Why you might want to go all in with AI

There’s a land grab at play, as with every technological revolution of the past. The industrial revolution, the personal computing revolution, the world wide web revolution, and more. In all cases, the biggest wins went to the first movers. The tinkerers, the explorers. The people who grasped the concept and dreamt big about what it could mean for their business and customers.

Those who watched, waited and jumped aboard slightly later still won, for sure, but the gains were marginal compared to the early adopters. If you’re staying still, you’re going backwards relative to those innovating. Those people include your current and future competitors, as they work out how to serve your target audience in a cheaper, faster and higher quality way.

If you start playing with the tools now, you take advantage of being in their first few customers. You get the early offers, you access those soon-to-be grandfathered rates. You send your feedback and ideas for new features and the founders actually listen. You co-create with creators and they adapt the platform to suit your exact needs. You understand how to harness them to your advantage before everyone is on board.

If you start building tools now, you capture the attention of experimenters, ones who may become your customers for life. As well as the users, you might get more publicity. AI directories are hungry to add new platforms. AI Shrine, AI Tool Mall, Future Tools and many others are proudly showcasing what creators are launching. What you’re doing is more newsworthy and you benefit from the novelty factor, because your tool might be the first of its kind. First mover advantage is not to be ignored.

The benefits of waiting

The opportunities of artificial intelligence and its application within your business are not without challenges. It’s not just a case of signing up and having your day-to-day transformed right away. Securing real benefits takes time: planning, analysing and building processes around new tools. There’s integration to think about. A whole host of new skills are required. Then there’s the cost. Most of the tools are not free, and they require setting up well to reap the benefits. What you save in freelancers you might spend in business owner brainspace, and that energy must come from somewhere.

Building tools is no mean feat, either. Your regular programmers might not know how to do it. You need to learn the lingo. You won’t know how to manage AI developers or how to assess their results. Without understanding the field in detail, you can’t imagine what’s possible and therefore don’t know how you build the future. Perhaps, given time, this will be an easier process with a tried-and-tested blueprint. You could just wait for the seminars and courses and follow along with the teachers that emerge.

Assuming that you believe artificial intelligence is here to stay, and that it’s only going to get better as the technology advances exponentially through research and practice, you might want to play the long game. Rather than experiment now, you let other people make the mistakes. You leave the guinea pigs to do their thing and you learn from their findings.

In the meantime, you stick to what you know. You continue building your company without the assistance of AI and you don’t waste time on the learning curve or money on the new tools that you haven’t yet carved out a budget for.

There is merit to waiting. If you’re already onto a winning idea and your business is growing, you might not want to change anything. You might not want to risk your team members learning new things or your clients having to get used to a new way of working. You might not want the potential downsides of using AI platforms or building your own. Putting the blinkers on could be how you choose to move forward.

What’s the solution?

The answer to this is different for every entrepreneur. To work out the way forward for you, assess the cost-benefit of exploring AI at this exact point in time. Decide when the optimal moment might be for you to climb the learning curve from the bottom. Pre-empt the risks of both acting and waiting.

Whatever your strategy, decide and stick to it. Remain oblivious, be tunnel-visioned and stick to what you know, or commit to learning and go all in. Hanging out in the middle might be confusing for everyone. You’re not sure how to spend your time, you don’t have enough knowledge to properly implement AI in your business, so you flit between approaches with little return.

If you decide to go all in, get hungry. Watch a YouTube video every day on the uses of AI in your industry. Read the whitepapers. Experiment with prompts. Follow long-time AI professionals on Twitter and ask them questions. Book time with developers to understand the behind-the-scenes. Aim to understand the nuts and bolts of what artificial intelligence is, so you can create the vision and execute accordingly. There’s no right or wrong answer, and only you hold the keys to your AI destiny.