AI Is Shrinking Product Life Cycles. How Can Businesses Respond?

Successful companies around the world have long tried to build barriers around their technology and information advantages, believing that exclusivity helps long-term profit. Yet rapid advances in AI are leading to shorter technology and product life cycles that are upending old notions of “long-term competitive advantage” and demand new business thinking, Kmind Consulting Chairman Noah Xie said at an executive strategy forum held in Silicon Valley earlier this month.

Xie, a long-time leading China business consultant, sees lessons for today’s world from the Chinese military classic, “The Art of War,” and believes cultural factors are a more important ingredient than ever in global business success. “The Art of War’’ ideas about positioning, timing and strategy are valid in today’s business world,” Xie said at the forum. Through powerful and disruptive, AI “can’t perceive the human heart,” said Xie, recalling the expression: “Those who win hearts win the world.” He elaborates on his approach in a new book out in October, “The Essence of Strategy.”

Xie founded Kmind in 2015, after an earlier career as an executive at Trout & Partners. Its more than 200 China customers over the years have included Anta, one of the world’s largest sportswear brands, Miniso, an up-and-coming retail giant, Feihe, one of China’s largest dairy products suppliers, and Bosideng, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of down jackets. Evidence of Kmind’s successful promotions hangs on the walls of the company’s headquarters at the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Kmind decided to hold an event in Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley– its first in the U.S. tech hub -- because Xie feels standard Western marketing approaches are coming up short in today’s AI-influenced business environment where barriers to product development and product launch times are falling.

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