8 AI Business Ideas to Inspire Your Next Product
The latest breakthroughs in AI technology have created endless business opportunities for entrepreneurs and startups to build products that solve problems that may have been considered unsolvable before.
Tech orgs are in a unique situation, in which we now have a solution and are trying to find a problem for it.
Many enthusiastic product leaders want to leverage AI to make the world a better place, but you might need some inspiration for the next product or feature you’ll build with AI.
This list of profitable AI business ideas will inspire your creativity. I hope these ideas help you come up with fresh new ideas to put AI at the forefront of your next big venture, or integrate it in a meaningful way in your existing product.
Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Products
These days, it seems like no matter what type of product you’re using, there’s at least one AI-powered feature in it. And too often, it seems like products add it just for the sake of saying they have AI. But sometimes, these AI features are actually good.
One thing is clear: AI is all over the place, and its presence is growing rapidly. In fact, the market of AI products is expected to more than 4x by 2030.
And with good reason—AI has a massive potential for solving real-life problems. Large Language Models (LLMs), for instance, take large amounts of content and generate useful responses based on it. You can use LLMs to summarize your Zoom calls, generate emails, help you draft your next social media post, and more.
Meanwhile, universal visual content generators (DALL-E 2, SORA, MidJourney, etc.) can visualize virtually anything you describe to them. I'll prove it: here's a product manager putting out (literal) fires at work:
But despite their massive potential, using AI models in your product comes with several caveats that you need to consider.
Pitfall 1: They're not reliable
The first major problem with AI is the ever-growing user distrust towards anything created or run by it. AI models tend to make a lot of mistakes. So no matter what the AI does for you, you will need to review it before finalizing your work.
The other source of distrust is AI bias. If the model is fed biased data, it can end up returning results that are incorrect at best and racist or sexist at worst.
Pitfall 2: They're not a silver bullet
The second major problem is businesses’ ability to make something useful out of AI. The quality of the model will depend on the quality of data you train it with. Gathering quality is expensive and time-consuming. So many companies end up with models that are far from being actually useful to their customers.
Keeping all this in mind, it’s natural to be excited about the potential of launching an artificial intelligence business. Let’s dive into some AI business ideas that might spark your next breakthrough!
If you go on Twitter it seems like everything is AI and it feels like it’s taken over the world and AGI is just around the corner, but it’s so early. And actually in the B2B context, it’s even earlier.
Listen to the full episode, How AI is Transforming Product Discovery, below!
8 Original, Useful, and Profitable AI Business Ideas
Here, I’ve outlined several great AI business ideas to get the ball rolling. You might think about how these ideas could apply in your context or share with your team during your next product design or brainstorming session.
1. AI Marketing Strategy Generator
Imagine a product that connects to your internal data with external sources (like market and competitor research), analyzes everything, and spits out a marketing strategy for your product. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?
- Technology: Any LLM or generative AI model.
- Type of data needed: Context about your product, goals, as well as data from internal and external sources.
- Why use AI: Marketing strategy needs a lot of qualitative input and thought. Regular software is unable to generate one.
Creating a marketing strategy is no easy feat. You and your team might spend weeks or even months gathering data, analyzing it, and turning it into a sound plan. But a well-fitted LLM model could at least produce a starting point in mere seconds.
2. Customs Fraud Detection System For Government Agencies
This could be a system that reads customs declarations and manifests and combines it with other relevant data to give a fraud risk score for each person or company going through customs clearance.
- Technology: Custom ML Model.
- Type of data needed: Tax and customs paperwork from legitimate and fraudulent companies.
- Why use AI: Existing non-AI fraud detection software is highly ineffective.
Customs agents are unable to check every piece of cargo, which means that they detect only a small fraction of the fraudulent goods that pass the border. With the predictive AI, they’ll use their limited time to check the companies that are most likely to commit fraud.
3. AI-Driven Cybersecurity Companion
What if there was a small widget on your screen that could constantly give you hints on how to make your browsing and everyday work more secure, and alert you when you do something dangerous?
- Technology: Custom ML Model.
- Type of data needed: User behavioral data on browsing the web and using apps.
- Why use AI: Antivirus software is limited to detecting dangerous links and software, but there are many other ways users can perform insecure actions.
With an AI companion, you can avoid using bad passwords, clicking on spammy ads, accidentally installing spyware, and running hidden mining scripts.
4. Adaptive e-Learning Platform For Customized Learning Experiences
Imagine an online educational platform where the class agenda is not fixed. Instead, it adapts to your background, skills, and learning style. It could change the teaching style (theory vs practical examples), the content of comprehension quizzes, and even the speed and intensity of the course itself.
- Technology: Custom ML Model.
- Type of data needed: Student behavioral data on different types of courses; student reviews of the courses.
- Why use AI: Personalizing course structure to individuals is very hard to achieve with classic software.
By personalizing the course for each person, you increase the chances of them finishing it and obtaining knowledge that they can use in real life.
5. Predictive Analytics AI Solution For Data-Driven Decision Making
This would be an AI tool that connects to your database and predicts the performance of your product. You could predict financial metrics, retention rates, and the effects of changes you make in your product.
- Technology: Custom ML Model.
- Type of data needed: Product analytics data from a given period along with the eventual KPI performance from a number of months to a year after that selected period.
- Why use AI: There are too many variables for a regular predictive data analysis software to process and give a reliable result.
Imagine releasing a feature and instantly seeing its impact on your metrics. This way, you can manage your product ideas better and turn them into high-quality outputs.
6. Business Model Generator With Pricing and Competitive Advantage Prediction
Imagine a tool where you describe your business idea and explain the real-life problem you want to solve, and it comes up with a business model that’s most likely to work for your future product. It could include the pricing strategy, features for beating the competition, and more. You could even integrate it with your idea management software to create a seamless product development workflow.
- Technology: Any LLM (e.g. ChatGPT) or generative AI model.
- Type of data needed: Business models, features, and prices of various products along with the info if they succeeded or failed.
- Why use AI: There are too many factors you need to consider for a business model. Regular software can work with a few, but not all of them at the same time.
Startups make a lot of mistakes and lose precious time on trial and error to reach their optimal business model. A tool like this could give you a viable, sound model in minutes.
7. Healthcare AI Chatbot For Preliminary Diagnosis
What if you could describe your symptoms and how you feel to a chatbot, and it would tell you which doctor to visit and whether it’s urgent or not? These AI-powered chatbots could also give you tips on what to do before help arrives in critical situations.
- Technology: Highly customized LLM for the healthcare industry.
- Type of data needed: Patient care data; list of symptoms and past medical history of patients along with diagnosed medical conditions.
- Why use AI: For such a service you would need a sizeable customer support team with medical knowledge. It would make your service quite costly.
Whenever you feel unwell, instead of panicking and trying to Google your symptoms (don’t do it!), you could instead have a handy assistant that would explain what’s happening to you and help you decide what to do next.
8. AI-Based Process Optimization Engine For Effective Supply Chain Management
This one could be an enterprise optimization engine for large logistics companies that would connect to all their systems and suggest routes and timing that are most optimal for delivering goods.
- Technology: Custom ML Model.
- Type of data needed: Shipping routes; departure and arrival times; inventory management logs; data on goods received and sent for each sorting center, etc.
- Why use AI: Current supply chain automation engines are complex and ineffective. Also, their functionality is quite hard to maintain.
Your product would coordinate the work of sorting and shipping products, and your project managers could focus their time on adding value to your service instead of maintaining the process.
Companies Leading the AI-Powered Revolution
The AI startup ideas above look quite promising, right? But I’m sure that many of you are still skeptical. After all, building a new business is hard—and building AI models is even harder. But it’s more than possible to achieve success with AI, and these companies are proving it.
Zestimate: Estimating Your Real Estate Value With Machine Learning
Zestimate is the brainchild of the real estate platform Zillow. It gives you an estimated value for your house or any other type of building based on a variety of factors.
Zestimate has been a win-win feature both for Zillow and its customers. Zillow increased user engagement by creating a reason for people to constantly visit its platform. Users, on the other hand, were able to get a realistic price tag for their house. With the power of AI, Zillow drastically increased the quality of their estimations.
Clerk.io: Cookieless E-Commerce Search and Recommendations
Clerk is a SaaS plugin that connects to your e-commerce platform. It uses powerful AI algorithms to streamline your search and recommendation engines, providing an improved customer experience.
Through proprietary AI development, they’ve also managed to handle search autocomplete and recommendations without the use of cookies, increasing the level of data privacy for the e-commerce sites that set it up.
Synthesia: Generating Studio-Quality Videos
Synthesia is a content creation AI app that generates video narration with the text you provide. With the help of their in-house natural language processing (NLP) models and generative AI, they show you avatars of people who narrate your text on a video.
This tool significantly decreases the price of video creation. It helps businesses in various industries achieve better customer engagement through video content for their target audiences.
Snyk: Vulnerability Detection In Software Development
Snyk is a tool that analyzes the code you’ve written and provides valuable insights about its level of security. Snyk’s proprietary AI model integrates with your development environment and is supported by most major providers. Once set up, it serves as a virtual assistant that provides real-time feedback on vulnerabilities you have left in your code and workflow.
The provider constantly updates its vulnerability database with the latest market trends to make sure that you’re secure from even the newest threats.
AI Technology Is Here To Stay
AI is dominating the software business landscape. If you want to build something that can compete in the current market and deliver amazing levels of customer satisfaction, then you have no choice but to adopt AI.
I hope that this list of AI-based business ideas helped you shape a new product idea and inspired you to start building it!
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