Hello Innovator!

There’s no question, AI is the elephant in just about every room today. We’ve been pretty quiet about it so far. But not today. Today, we’ve been inspired to discuss the impact of AI on the world of innovation.

Dig in to learn what you should be focusing in and how to integrate AI in a manner than can accelerate your innovation efforts. Just be aware, the machine won’t innovate for you.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• This Week’s Article: Fine. Let's talk AI and Innovation.

• Share This: How is AI changing innovation?

• Case Study: How Mondelez Uses AI to Accelerate Product Innovation

Fine. Let’s talk AI and Innovation.

What happens when both ideas and execution are cheap?

There was a time when execution was everything.

The phrase “ideas are cheap, execution is everything” became gospel in both startup and corporate innovation circles. It made sense. Building, shipping, and scaling were hard. And, as a result, most teams never got past the slide decks and strategy docs stages.

But that dynamic is changing. Fast. Thanks to, you guessed it…AI.

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of execution. You can now generate working code, visual assets, landing pages, and even MVPs in hours, not weeks. What once required entire product teams can now be done with a decent prompt and a sense of direction.

Some have argued that the script has flipped…that we’ve gone from “Ideas are cheap, execution is everything.” to a world of “Execution is cheap, ideas are everything.” 

So what does this AI-driven shift mean for innovation?

I’d argue that it doesn’t mean ideas are now everything.
It also doesn’t mean execution is everything.
It means we’re entering a new era.

It means that the true shift in focus now lies in discovery — in our ability to run high-velocity experiments, test assumptions, iterate, and zero in on product-market fit before competitors even realize there’s a disruption afoot.

Execution Is Now Table Stakes

Execution isn’t everything, but it also hasn’t disappeared.
It’s simply no longer a differentiator.

Whether you’re building inside a $5B company or bootstrapping a startup, AI and automation are leveling the playing field. The things that use to require design resources and dev time, the landing pages, prototypes, user flows, and experiments, can now be produced in minutes and deployed in seconds. And the results can be measured by machines.

This shift repositions building as a low-cost, high-speed tool for learning.
But it doesn’t eliminate the need to build and execute.

Teams that treat execution as the end goal will still fail. Faster. 
Teams that treat it as a feedback loop for experimentation will get smarter. Faster.

Ideas Still Aren’t Enough

Let’s kill another myth while we’re at it…

Even in this new context, ideas are NOT the new advantage. (Sorry Greg…but not sorry.)

You don’t need more brainstorming sessions.
Smart people have always had smart ideas and will continue to do so.
You need the ability to test those ideas against real-world behavior as quickly as possible.

The most promising concepts still die without traction. The only way to find the signal is to test. Rigorously and systematically.

The quality of your idea is only revealed through execution.
The value of your execution is only unlocked through experimentation.

And when experimentation and learning is the name of the game, speed is a major advantage. This is where the shift is happening.

The New Center of Gravity: Speed to Learning

In this new environment, what actually creates value?

• Speed to insight.

• Speed to market feedback.

• Speed to product–market fit.

• Speed to iteration and improvement.

When execution becomes cheap, the bottleneck becomes how fast you can learn.

You don’t need six months to prove a hypothesis. You don’t need a full-stack team to test a new user journey. And you don’t need a multi-million-dollar innovation budget to find out if a market exists.

You need a framework for experimentation, a bias toward action, and the discipline to kill weak ideas early.

In this world, the world of AI, creating a culture of innovation — an organizational environment that consistently fosters creative thinking, experimentation, and the pursuit of new ideas — is the number one thing you can do to future-proof your business.

AI as an Innovation Enabler

This is where AI changes the game. But the important thing to remember is this: the power of AI is NOT in doing the work for you, but rather in changing what the work is that needs to be done.

AI is a force multiplier for rapid learning:

• You can launch five variations of an MVP instead of one.

• You can test five different GTM narratives before choosing a path.

• You can simulate, prototype, revise, and relaunch in days—not quarters.

The outcome isn’t just more experiments. It’s more cycles of learning, faster.

This is how innovators get an edge. It’s not about the best idea. And it’s also not about the execution. It’s the fact that you can execute faster in order to test more and learn what works…or doesn’t.

It’s about testing ten paths to disruption before anyone else has shipped even one.

AI’s Implications for Corporate Innovators

Corporate innovators can’t keep pretending that execution is expensive.

Let’s be honest: most corporate innovation teams are still moving at 2015 speed. They’re stuck in models that assume execution is budget-intensive, headcount-limited, and politically fragile. And because “execution” is treated as a precious resource, every idea is treated like it needs a business case, cross-functional team signoff, and an executive sponsor just to get off the ground.

That logic no longer holds.

Welcome to a world where prototypes can be built by an individual with AI over a weekend. Welcome to a world where an MVP can be launched in a low-risk market with a simple code deployment. Welcome to a world where ideas can be tested with real users, without a full product team.

If your innovation process still holds experimentation as a hallowed process that’s gated behind planning cycles, roadmap meetings, and five-page strategy decks, you’re not just slow… You’re irrelevant.

Execution isn’t expensive, your process is.

The role of a corporate innovation team is no longer to deliver fully baked business units. It’s to create a steady flow of tested, validated insights that the company can act on. That requires speed, flexibility, and a willingness to run dozens — or hundreds — of micro-experiments, not one or two “big bets” a year.

Ideas still aren’t everything. Neither is execution.

Discovery is the new deliverable.
AI is the new tool kit.
And your culture is still the thing that will make or break your ability to keep up.

In this new reality, what actually drives impact is your ability to generate hypotheses worth testing. It’s your ability to test those hypotheses rapidly. And it’s your ability to recognize the signals and act on them.

Call it velocity. Call it feedback loops. Call it speed to learning.

Whatever label you prefer, THIS now the defining advantage in innovation.
And AI makes it accessible.

But only to teams who shift their mindset accordingly.