Growth culture in the AI era: how to stay relevant and leverage AI for business growth
How is AI changing our approach to business growth? What does the next decade look like for growth operators, and how will growth strategy and tactics change with the spread of artificial intelligence?
In this article, I explore how AI is changing the way companies tackle growth. Using real examples as well as hypothetical scenarios, we look at how AI is already making its mark on business growth and how you will need to evolve your approach or face becoming irrelevant.
How AI is changing growth culture
Tech moves fast. Very fast. It seems like only yesterday we were all growth hacking and A/B testing the hell out of our products. During my 8 years at the then scale-up – now unicorn – travel site Skyscanner, we successfully created the conditions required for a sustained period of hypergrowth. Indeed, such was the pace of change and expansion, that by the time I left Skyscanner, it felt like I'd worked at five different start-ups, rather than one company.
But a growth tactic that worked a decade ago, most likely won’t be (as) effective now. People like novelty, but get bored once an approach has been overused. In the era of growth hacking, A/B testing was preached endlessly, and by and large, when done correctly (ie when statistically significant) it delivered results.
The challenge was making decisions when you didn’t have enough data to make a clear call. Not everything can be A/B tested, and startups with small user bases struggled because A/B tests took too long to get sufficient numbers - if they ever got them at all.
AI is changing the approach; it has brought in an age of creative abundance. For better or worse, it is now much cheaper and much faster to write an article, translate web copy, summarise a complex report, generate an illustration or even a video advert.
Putting aside for now the obvious negative consequences of replacing human labour with machine-generated assets, AI’s upside is enabling the mass creation of ‘good-enough’ marketing materials, at a lower cost than ever before.
And by massively reducing the cost of materials and tooling, growth can be achieved by providing a far more personalised user experience. Essentially, AI enables the mass mobilisation of personal, one-to-one sales agents, able to have intelligent conversations with potential customers and current users.
AI or Die? Post-AI growth in an age of creative abundance
Andrew Chen, a prominent thinker on the subject of business growth, explores the transformative impact of AI on marketing in an essay that emphasises both immediate and long-term implications. We can summarise the core themes and applications of AI in marketing that he covers:
Infinite Labor and Content
AI will enable endless variations and customisation of marketing materials, drastically reducing costs and time for content creation.
Personalized marketing will become the norm, with ads tailored in real-time to individual preferences and behaviours.
Mass Personalization
AI-driven tools will allow marketers to deliver highly personalized content at scale, making every interaction unique and relevant to the consumer.
This extends to internationalisation, where AI can tailor messages to cultural nuances and languages instantaneously.
New Marketing Channels
Traditional marketing channels will evolve or become obsolete as AI generates vast amounts of content and interactions.
Conversational AI and virtual companions will become primary marketing interfaces, embedding promotional content seamlessly into daily interactions.
Real-Time Adaptation
Marketing strategies will operate on an accelerated OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), enabling real-time adjustments based on consumer feedback and behaviour.
Campaigns can be continuously optimised, ensuring higher engagement and effectiveness.
Authenticity and Human Touch
In a world saturated with AI-generated perfection, authenticity will become a key differentiator. Consumers will crave genuine, human-like interactions, prompting marketers to balance AI efficiency with a human touch.
Convergence of Marketing and Sales
AI will blur the lines between marketing and sales, with AI agents providing personalised pitches and support akin to one-on-one sales interactions.
This convergence will lead to a more integrated approach, where marketing efforts seamlessly transition into sales activities.
Growth before and after AI: a thought experiment
Skyscanner grew fast during its first 5 years; the company went from a few dozen staff to several hundred. But rather than revenue figures continuing to increase as the headcount went up, things started to slow down.
It's a well-documented phenomenon: as staff numbers rise, so do overheads, misalignment, and disagreements – which rather than bringing growth, have the opposite effect; the company becomes bloated and growth tails off.
At Skyscanner, we realised we had gone from an agile little startup to a larger organisation with:
A high level of manual tasks
High waste
Big batch gambles
Subjective decisions – not based on data
Low ownership and little autonomy
Functional siles
Old school marketing
Without a significant change, Skyscanner's flight was destined to stall. Changes were required, and quickly.
Firstly, we needed to define exactly what growth was and therefore what everyone should be aiming for. After much discussion, we settled on the definition of growth as:
"Monetized users that come back and back at scale" which was proxied by our (arguable) North Star Metric of TTV (Total Transaction Value).
Next, we embarked on a company-wide education program to align everyone with this growth mindset to ensure the whole organisation was brought along on our growth journey, from the very start. Because when you require a fundamental change to the way your people work, it pays to create alignment around the definition and ensure people have collaborating rather than competing goals and KPIS.
The results were dramatic. We survived the slowdown and then began to pick up the growth pace again. User numbers hockey-sticked, along with our revenue. A few more years of hypergrowth and Skyscanner became a unicorn.
Implementing AI-Driven Cultural Change Today
That’s a highly simplified version of events. But now let's look at what might have been done differently, had AI been around 15 years ago. How could Skyscanner have leveraged AI to transition from a nimble startup to a larger organisation facing several operational and cultural challenges, including manual processes and outdated marketing practices?
In the context of the current AI-driven opportunities, Skyscanner could leverage AI to enhance its cultural transformation more effectively than a decade ago. This is how it could be achieved:
1. Automate Manual Tasks and Reduce Waste
AI Integration: Implement AI to automate repetitive and manual tasks. Use AI-driven tools for data entry, customer service (via chatbots), and internal communications.
Example: automaton of manual tasks was already something Skyscanner had put a lot of resources into. Building scrips to generate reports, rather than having a human sifting through spreadsheets each month, was one such example. But AI would have allowed this at a far greater speed and scale.
It would also allow anyone to quickly and easily find information from the vast sea of data that was generated, and give them the ability to quickly summarise those reports to get the actionable points fast. Having AI serve up tailored, pertinent information whenever it was needed, would enable teams to make faster, better decisions, in much less time, reducing admin.
2. Data-Driven Decision Making
AI Analytics: Utilize AI analytics platforms to gather real-time data insights and predictive analytics. This can help to make informed, objective decisions rather than relying on subjective judgment.
Example: AI could enhance the ‘test and learn’ culture that Skyscanner had already been using to speed up decisions, and quickly - perhaps even automatically - implement changes. For example, deciding exactly what to show a user, based on their search, their previous browsing history and any other data already gleaned.
This approach could be both ‘top of funnel’, for example, someone wanting a ‘beach holiday’ but unsure exactly where, or taken right down to a very granular level, for example selecting different images to show a user when they searched for ‘flights to New York’, knowing what images were most likely to convert any given individual to a booking. AI allows this at a scale never before possible.
3. Personalization and Customer Engagement
AI Personalization: Use AI to deliver personalized user experiences at scale. Implement AI algorithms to tailor search results, recommendations, and marketing messages to individual users.
Example: AI can analyze user preferences and behaviour to provide personalized travel recommendations, improving user satisfaction and loyalty. Essentially, AI provides each user with their own, personal travel agent that could answer questions, make destination suggestions based on their travel desires, and even offer advice, travel tips, guides and other information, post-booking. The traveller gets a better, faster experience, perfectly tailored to them, and Skyscanner can serve more travellers, more deeply, with fewer resources.
4. Breaking Down Functional Silos
AI Communication and Collaboration: Use AI to facilitate communication across departments. AI can help in understanding cross-departmental dependencies and optimising workflow.
Example: AI-driven project management tools can provide a holistic view of projects, ensuring that different departments are working synergistically towards common goals. By integrating data from different systems and sources, a unified view of information across the entire org - previously painful to achieve - can now be garnered much more easily.
And with AI powering ‘smart project management’, teams can collaborate, track progress and allocate resources more efficiently than before. Teams and functions operating autonomously was generally a good thing at Skyscanner, but top-level alignment is essential to ensure all those teams are shooting in the same direction. AI would have allowed Skyscanner to reap the benefits of having multiple, fast-moving units, but ensured they were unified in working towards the same goal.
5. Modernizing Marketing Approaches
AI Marketing Automation: Leverage AI to automate and optimize marketing campaigns. AI can help create, test, and iterate on marketing materials more efficiently.
Example: Use AI to generate content, run A/B tests, and optimize ad spend in real-time based on performance data. AI can also predict market trends and consumer behaviour, helping to tailor marketing strategies accordingly.
The major ad players - Facebook and Google - have already implemented AI-driven tools into their platforms enabling concepts such as ‘Smart Bidding’ which optimises bids in real-time, maximising conversions and value, or predicts future customer actions, such as propensity to convert or churn, and makes immediate adjustments accordingly.
Essentially, AI can do what Skyscanner was already doing with human effort, much faster and better, thereby freeing up time for human creativity rather than being bogged down by endless data analysis and keyword optimisation.
By integrating these AI-driven strategies, Skyscanner could not only address the issues it faced a decade ago but also position itself as a leader in leveraging cutting-edge technology to drive growth and innovation.
This approach would ensure that the company remained agile, customer-focused, and efficient. It would also help attract top talent, keen to work with the most forward-thinking work environments. And these are the areas that all companies who want to find growth in this brave new world of AI will need to invest in, to stay relevant, beat the competition, and keep growing.
Finding growth in the new AI world: the race is on
The next few years will be an extremely interesting period for growth practitioners. Keeping up with the new benefits that AI brings will dictate which companies propel themselves forward, and which fall by the wayside, out-competed by those who have mastered AI for superior insights, cultural shifts, enhanced analysis and quicker, faster content creation.
It’s an exciting but overwhelming new world. If you want to transition faster and help your business or organisation take advantage, I can help. Browse my growth services here. Or contact me here.