More than 500 participants joined a recent public webinar where I spoke about AI for business growth. With an audience that large, I was reminded that “growth” can mean very different things to different businesses.
That became clearer after the webinar when a business owner contacted me about developing a digital strategy. Her company provides specialized printing for food and beverage packaging. During the session, I had discussed the difference between competing in a crowded red ocean and finding opportunities in a less contested space. The discussion made her reconsider how differentiated her own business might be.
It would have been easy to start talking about digital marketing. AI could help identify customer segments, develop campaigns, prepare sales messages and produce content. But a more important question needed to come first: What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Is the challenge awareness? Finding the right institutional customers? Pricing? Differentiation? Or reaching customers whose requirements and order volumes fit what the business can competitively provide?
I do not yet know. Answering those questions requires more information and evidence. That uncertainty is precisely the point.
During a recent business trip, I also had opportunities to talk with people involved in businesses that have already expanded to dozens or even hundreds of locations. Those conversations reminded me that the problems businesses face change as they scale.
An entrepreneur may initially worry about attracting enough customers. A growing company can find itself dealing with a different set of concerns: rising costs, margins, sourcing, inventory, consistency, forecasting, and expansion.
Consider something as ordinary as a printed drinking cup. A supplier’s minimum order may appear substantial to a small business. For a company supporting a large branch network, that quantity can look very different.
Then other considerations emerge. Local sourcing may provide shorter lead times and greater flexibility, while importing may offer different cost advantages. Longer sourcing lead times require businesses to anticipate demand and plan inventory earlier. Order too much and resources are tied up in stock. Order too little and the company risks
running out of something its operations require every day.
What initially looks like a purchasing decision can quickly become a question involving cost, volume, lead time, inventory, cash flow, and operational risk.
The more I listened, the more the original digital-strategy question changed. Finding customers might be one challenge. Finding customers whose requirements, volumes, and economics fit the business could be another.
This is one reason conversations with other entrepreneurs remain valuable to me. People who have already encountered the challenges of growth can surface issues that someone at an earlier stage may not yet have considered.
Their experiences are not substitutes for evidence. One entrepreneur’s experience does not establish how an entire market behaves. But conversations can reveal questions worth investigating.
I have experienced a similar reassessment in my own digital activities.
I still maintain a presence on Facebook and Instagram, but I increasingly spend my relationship-building time in Viber communities and professional associations. Facebook began to feel like a red ocean for the kind of interaction I wanted. With so much content competing for attention, producing even more of it did not necessarily address my objective.
That does not make Viber inherently better than Facebook. I simply became clearer about the role I wanted each channel to play. Social platforms can help me maintain visibility, while smaller communities allow more direct interaction and relationship building.
Another business may reach an entirely different conclusion because its customers and objectives are different. Channel choice should follow the customer and the objective, rather than the popularity of the platform.
The same principle applies when developing a digital strategy. Starting with a social media calendar may be premature when the more important questions involve customers, costs, processes, capacity, or the economics of the business itself.
This is also how I have increasingly approached AI. In my business AI sessions, I use a simple sequence: People → Process → Data → AI → Governance → Value
Start with people. Who are we trying to serve, and what do they need?
Examine the process. Where is the friction? What is preventing the business from performing better?
Look at the data. What do we actually know about customers, costs, demand, capacity and performance? Which assumptions still need to be tested?
Then ask where AI can help.
AI may help research markets, analyze costs, compare scenarios, identify potential customer segments, examine sales information, forecast demand, prepare communications, or automate repetitive work. The appropriate application depends on the problem we are trying to solve.
Governance matters because businesses also need to determine what information can be used, what needs verification, which decisions require human authorization and who remains accountable.
Finally, ask what value was created. What actually improved?
This matters because AI makes increasing activity remarkably easy. A business can publish more posts, send more messages, create more advertisements, and prepare more proposals. But activity and growth are different things. If customer acquisition is not the real constraint, producing more marketing may simply create more activity around the wrong problem.
Sometimes a business needs more customers. Another needs better margins. One needs to reduce costs, while another needs better inventory management or more reliable information for decision-making. A company preparing to expand into a new market will encounter yet another set of questions.
AI can help us investigate these problems. We can use it to research markets, work with available data, compare alternatives, and test assumptions much faster than before.
But sometimes the question itself emerges from somewhere else: a conversation with a customer, an observation from the field, or an exchange with another entrepreneur who has already encountered the challenge we are beginning to face.
So before asking AI how to grow a business, perhaps the first questions belong to us: Where are we creating value? Where are we losing it? What is preventing us from doing better? What evidence do we have?
Then we can decide where AI belongs. There is a reason AI is fourth, not first.