This article is based on Mike Kolman’s talk at our sister community's Amsterdam Product Marketing Summit.


Need to bring an AI-powered product to market but don't know where to start? You're in the right place. As AI transforms our industry at lightning speed, it's easy to feel left behind. But don't worry – I've got your back. 

Drawing from my experience at Salesforce, I'll share three essential learnings to help you navigate the AI landscape with confidence. In this article, we'll dive into:

  • The evolution of AI
  • The AI hype cycle and where we stand today
  • Why many AI projects fail and how to set yours up for success
  • Three key learnings from my experience of launching an AI product.

Let’s get into it.

The evolution of AI

It can’t have escaped your notice that we're in a bit of an AI revolution right now – but how did we get here? Let me set the stage.

For about 30 years, we were in wave one of artificial intelligence – predictive AI, which uses numbers data to generate very simple predictions.

Since 2022, when ChatGPT launched their 3.5 model, anyone working in B2B SaaS has been hearing the terms "generative AI," "Gen AI," or "artificial intelligence" about a thousand times a day. This marks the beginning of wave two, which involves using natural language – speaking or writing to a large language model (LLM) – to generate something that didn’t exist before.

We're already moving rapidly towards the third wave. This involves building autonomous agents that can automate tasks so you don't have to do them anymore. 

I imagine it won’t be long before we see wave four – artificial general intelligence. Think Terminator!