It’s Time to Innovate Again - Make Sure You Have the Right Focus

After delays, detours, and “wait and see” with respect to tariffs and fears of recessions I've noticed the focus is finally shifting back to building better businesses through innovation.

Where and how should you innovate?

Here's the opportunity: Let the computers do as much work for you as you can, and position yourself as the expert.

But, before I explain more, let's take a look at what got us here.

Like what you see? Want to see more? I invite you to chat with my team at Shinydocs.

How Did We Get Here?

For the past five years, our industry has been stuck in holding patterns.

Here's a quick overview of the timeline:

• Pandemic pause – In the scramble to adapt, we lost entire “Innovation Officer” roles. Focus shifted from building new ideas to keeping remote work running smoothly. Innovation got sidelined.
• The “wait and see” years – Tariffs? Stock buybacks? Recession? Every month brought a new “maybe” that kept leaders from pulling the trigger on real change. It’s like the old joke: Economists have successfully predicted the last 25 of the last 6 recessions.
• The return of forward motion – Today, people are tired of waiting. They want to get better. They’re ready to invest in improvements and open up the conversation (and the budgets) again.

The Time For Innovation is Here

The question now isn’t whether to innovate, but where.

Where?  For the first time in history, the computer can creatively aid making the asset you need to do your job, based upon the information your organization already has.  It's game changing.

What? Just like on the web with Google or ChatGPT the answer is AI Search inside your organization!

I recommend it not just because it finds the data, but because it creates the work product you actually need.

Being able to command AI to "find me the presentation" is useful.

But, commanding it to "Create the next presentation based on the last one" is where the real opportunity lies.

At some point, our entire job will be knowing what we need, letting the computer generate it, and then refining and validating.

We'll ditch the old way of finding the right reference document, reading it, copying and pasting from it - and replace it with AI Search that can assemble it for you.

The Shift Has Already Started

This is not the reality of the future...this is happening now.

Here’s a video example of AI Search in action. Watch how easy it is for me to find and update an SOP document with AI search.