What Steve Jobs Would Tell You About Your Upcoming Pivot to AI

In 1997, Steve Jobs had returned to Apple as an advisor and the company had just sunsetted a promising technology called OpenDoc. An audience member angrily asked him about this decision, and Jobs’ response contains a nugget of wisdom I find myself playing for tech CEOs over and over.

One of the things I’ve always found is you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and figure out where you’re going to go sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anyone in this room. I have the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case. […] [You can’t say] let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that.

Most people don’t know this, but Steve Jobs was actually a decent technologist. No, he wasn’t anywhere near Woz or the other engineers at Apple, but he wrote code. He geeked out over tech breakthroughs. He understood the appeal of shiny new features. But — and this is what set him apart from most tech founders today — he knew that technology itself wasn’t enough. He was always looking for that moment where the tech became a useable product, something that a normal person could find a reason to be excited about.

I remember, with the Laser Writer, we built the world’s first small laser printer. There was awesome technology in that box. We had the first Canon cheap laser printing in the United States, we had a very wonderful controller that we designed, we had Adobe’s Postscript software, we had AppleTalk in there, just awesome technology in the box.

And I remember seeing the first printout come out of it, and just picking it up and looking, and thinking, “You know what? We can sell this.” Because you don’t need to know anything about what’s in that box. All we have to do is hold this up and say “do you want this?”

Most tech companies, frankly, never reach this point. And adding AI to your offering doesn’t change that, and in fact often makes it worse.

I’m more pro-AI than most people I know in either design or tech. I’ve been consulting with companies for the last year trying to help leadership get their heads on straight about how to tackle this awesome new tech and build it into their products effectively. And step one is what Steve Jobs would tell you if you could get coffee with him today: he’d say forget the tech and figure out what problem you’re trying to solve, because people don’t buy tech, they buy solutions. (yes, even developers)

The other stumbling block is that people aren’t looking for AI features. In fact, they’re actively avoiding them because the tech hype is causing a perception that AI hype is as breathless and useless as NFTs, fairly or not.

Put down your IDEs. Stop chasing tech. Read the room and understand that the AI backlash is in full effect, so leading with it as a feature can do more harm than good. Go back to the whiteboard and figure out a need that isn’t being addressed. Address it. And if you used AI to address it, maybe don’t shout it from the rooftops. At best, people don’t care as long as your product solves a need. At worst, it’s a reason for people to avoid your offering outright.

You just need the moment where you can hold up a static image and say “do you want this?” and have people enthusiastically say yes. That’s the bar. Keep looking until you find it.