Superhuman Innovation Book Summary - Superhuman Innovation Book explained in key points

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Name: Superhuman Innovation
Rating: 4.2 (156 reviews)
Author: Chris Duffey

Chris Duffey

Transforming Business with Artificial Intelligence

4.2 (156 ratings)

22 mins

Topics

Entrepreneurship Artificial Intelligence Innovation

Table of Contents

Superhuman Innovation
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Learn how AI is shifting the business landscape and how you can harness it.

Throughout history, a few key human inventions have reshaped the world as we know it. In the late eighteenth century, the First Industrial Revolution refashioned our approach to textiles and gave rise to coal and steam power. Then came the Second Industrial Revolution with its assembly lines, mass production, TV, and radio. Most recently, we’ve witnessed the Third Industrial Revolution with the advent of the internet.

Now, we’re on the verge of what some are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the rise of artificial intelligence. However, this term might not quite do justice to the impact AI will have on humanity. In 2015, a study released by consulting firm McKinsey determined that new advancements in AI are developing ten times faster than the technology in the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. On top of that, these tools are rapidly being implemented in all corners of the globe.

In these blinks, you’ll find out some of the dramatic ways AI is impacting businesses around the world and how your company can use AI to gain competitive advantage. You’ll also get acquainted with the author’s SUPER model – a guide to the ways in which AI enables innovation through Speed, Understanding, Performance, Experimentation, and Results.

Along the way, you’ll learn

how the world could become “smart”;
how AI can predict heart failure; and
what the Roman aqueducts and SpaceX have in common.

AI’s place in the world is growing, and its potential is enormous.

Take a second to think about the role artificial intelligence plays in your daily life. Any time you ask Siri what the weather’s like, watch a YouTube video with automated captions, or send a handy email response Gmail has provided, you’re interacting with AI.

There are so many different applications for AI, yet we’ve still only scratched the surface of its potential. AI is destined to become an even greater part of our daily lives with the internet of things, or IoT. This technology enables everyday objects to be fitted with computers that can transmit data back to the companies that created them. Picture a smart refrigerator that can keep track of food expiration dates and order new groceries for you once you run out.

While tools like Siri or smart fridges are useful tools for the day-to-day, AI could eventually help us do so much more. Think self-driving cars that eliminate road accidents – or smart mining, which would increase safety in one of the world’s most dangerous professions. AI could even eliminate highly contagious viruses like dengue fever. In fact, Microsoft is already working on an AI-powered trap which can target and kill mosquitos carrying that particular virus.

In all the examples we’ve discussed so far, you might’ve noticed that AI isn’t affecting our lives in ways that science fiction films of the past predicted. In other words, AI isn’t destined to result in a robot uprising. This is because AI is simply a tool that humans have created, and it requires humans to implement it. Of course, that isn’t to say that AI can’t perform certain tasks much faster and more efficiently than humans. Both artificial and human intelligence have their particular strengths and weaknesses. Keep this in mind next time you hear someone warning that AI’s capabilities will soon overtake our own.

So, we now have a snapshot of what AI is capable of and how it’s changing the world in general. In the next two blinks, we’ll look at the unique challenges AI and other digital technology present to the business world specifically. After that, we’ll examine the SUPER framework – the author’s model for uncovering the ways AI can assist businesses.

Digital technology has dramatically changed customer expectations and behavior.

Most people can still recall the days when mobile phones flipped open to reveal a simple keyboard that could only make calls or send short messages. Nowadays, 82 percent of Americans walk around with powerful, pocket-sized computers at all times.

The capabilities offered by smartphones have significantly changed customer expectations. Take something as simple as ordering a pizza. These days, we expect to be able to order, pay, and track the delivery person right up to the moment they arrive at our door – all from our phone. Long gone are the hassles of having to verbally repeat complex orders, let alone having to pick up everything from the restaurant yourself.

AI speaks the language of data, which requires infrastructure to be useful.

Recall the last time you ordered a product online from a site like Amazon. On your end, the process probably seemed unbelievably simple – just a few clicks and the purchase appeared at your doorstep the next day, or even the same evening.

Now, think about how much data had to be transferred on Amazon’s end to get that package to you on time. The product itself is attached to a barcode, and all the details about it – like its dimensions and location in the warehouse – are stored in an Amazon database. When you place an order, the product needs to be retrieved from the warehouse, boxed up, and assigned to a delivery service. The box gets its own barcode, shipping records are created, the package is delivered, and you get a text or email confirmation.

Artificial intelligence helps to speed up and optimize work processes.

Back in the early twentieth century, Henry Ford was on a quest to make cars for the multitudes. At the time, though, it took 12 hours for a group of workers to put together a new car – which was just too slow. A dramatic change happened in 1913 when Ford invented the assembly line. Now, each worker only had to install one part of the car before passing it on to the next. This brought the assembly time down to just 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Why was this development so significant? Because a business can only sell as many units as it can manufacture without accruing massive additional labor costs. If you can only make 10,000 units, then that’s all you’ll be able to sell.

AI increases understanding and reveals insights that allow businesses to provide better service.

Picture a marketplace in ancient times, packed full of vendors all vying for people’s attention. How did these vendors ensure that someone bought their freshly baked bread instead of someone else’s? By understanding their customers’ desires and changing their pitch according to the context.

To make sales to prospective buyers, businesses have always needed the second word in the SUPER framework: Understanding. What’s changed are the methods of getting to know your customer. Using AI, you can learn customers’ wants and needs and adapt your strategy based on the feedback you receive.

AI can both measure and optimize performance.

If you’ve worked in a large enough company, you’ve probably heard of KPIs, or key performance indicators. For example, perhaps your company wants to increase year-over-year growth by 100 percent. This and other KPIs are ways of measuring how successful an organization has been at achieving its objectives on both the company-wide and departmental level. On the flip side, they can also be a major source of stress, leading employees to fear being perceived as failures.

As a company, it’s important not to judge anyone too harshly for not meeting a KPI, but to instead treat those gaps as areas to improve and optimize. You may have chosen the wrong targets or need other measurements to get a fuller picture of why a product performed a certain way. Or, your data source may be of questionable quality. All of these factors could lead you to mistakenly optimize for the wrong thing.

AI enables businesses to experiment, solve problems, and get results.

Historically, humans have excelled at using experimentation and imagination to solve real-world problems. Take the Roman aqueducts. These impressive structures were built long before text messages, trucks, or even explosives were invented. But ancient Rome’s growing population desperately needed a steady supply of water, so they used innovation to dream up the necessary structure to obtain it.

Just as the Romans used the technology available at the time to help them solve their problems, we can use our own modern-day tools – like AI – to experiment and accomplish difficult goals. We call this chain actionable curiosity, a process that brings us the final two components of the SUPER framework: Experimentation and Results.

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What is Superhuman Innovation about?

Superhuman Innovation (2019) explores the impressive breadth of possibilities that artificial intelligence (AI) offers to all fields of business, from healthcare to fashion. Rather than cause a robotic takeover, it argues, human-machine collaboration will empower businesses and consumers alike to set and achieve greater goals than ever before.

Best quote from Superhuman Innovation

[L]et humans do what they do best and AI do what it does best.

—Chris Duffey

Who should read Superhuman Innovation?

Business students looking for a rundown on the impact of AI across various industries
Entrepreneurs who want to incorporate AI into their future company
Business owners seeking to better leverage the power of AI

About the Author

Chris Duffey is the strategic development manager for Adobe Creative Cloud. He is an AI, mobile, and wearable technologist whose work has been featured in over 100 media outlets around the world. Superhuman Innovation, his first book, was co-written with the help of AI.

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