How Entrepreneurs Can Use AI to Better Understand Their Target Customers

Successful entrepreneurship and innovation have always required a deep understanding of target customers’ needs, wants and goals. Traditionally, gaining these insights has been time-consuming and resource-intensive, but the emergence of artificial intelligence is changing the game. By leveraging AI tools, entrepreneurs can now analyze customer data at scale, extract valuable insights and make data-driven decisions.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Entrepreneur magazine.

I’m an entrepreneurship professor at Babson College, where I teach future-focused courses on AI and entrepreneurship, and I lead our AI lab. While some in business believe AI is overhyped, the unfolding AI age will be a revolution for entrepreneurs—and my students—aiming to explore, understand and seize business opportunities.

AI can accelerate human creativity and inquisitiveness, helping entrepreneurs unearth insights about what customers want and value. My research, industry work and teaching at the nexus of AI and innovation show that AI capabilities will only grow in importance. Here’s why.

Tapping into AI’s Superpowers to Scale Insights

One of AI’s superpowers is synthesizing vast amounts of data and empathizing with customers more deeply—quickly.

Tools like Otter.ai can transcribe focus group sessions or customer interviews within seconds, allowing entrepreneurs to rapidly identify unmet needs, pain points and value-creators. Sentiment analysis APIs like those offered by Microsoft Azure can detect emotional cues and tones in customer conversations that humans might miss. By aggregating these data over time, entrepreneurs can get a deeper understanding of how customers feel about their brand, product or service. That’s insight at scale.

MORE IN BABSON MAGAZINE: The Age of AI: Seven Things Entrepreneurs Need to Know

AI also can help entrepreneurs tap into the voice of the customer at scale. Customer feedback from various sources such as social media, product reviews and customer support tickets can be automatically collected and analyzed using tools like MeaningCloud. By setting up automated workflows using platforms like Zapier, entrepreneurs can streamline the process of gathering and analyzing customer feedback, enabling them to identify recurring issues and opportunities for improvement and innovation.

AI also can assist in rapidly iterating on value propositions, such as for a website or important presentations to customers. Tools like Claude can help entrepreneurs quickly generate variations of their messaging based on customer feedback. These variations can then be fed into platforms like Copy.ai to create compelling product descriptions that resonate with a target audience. By continuously refining their messaging based on customer input, entrepreneurs can arrive at a winning value proposition much more efficiently.

Customizing the Customer Experience

Real-world examples demonstrate the power of AI in understanding and engaging customers. One of my top undergraduate students at Babson, Chloe Samaha, founded BOND, a virtual water cooler app for remote and hybrid teams. The app’s core purpose is to support culture-building, employee satisfaction and worker retention among distributed teams.

Her company uses the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate personalized, culture-specific daily questions—answered by all—that drive engagement and retention among employees. By analyzing engagement data, BOND continuously refines its AI model to deliver engaging content tailored to each company. Without ChatGPT, this level of customization would be impossible at scale. The results speak for themselves: BOND has facilitated over 20 million moments of connection between colleagues and achieved an impressive 300% year-over-year revenue growth, highlighting AI’s potential to customize experiences that resonate with users and drive business success. BOND gets and seizes upon the insight-generation capabilities of AI.

As AI continues to evolve, its potential applications for entrepreneurship are boundless, particularly for the rapid prototyping of entrepreneurial ideas. ChaptGPT’s ever-improving ability to support text-to-code enables non-coders to prototype their software ideas simply by describing them to an AI. And those who already know how to code can now do so five to 10 times faster.

“The barriers between the digital and physical world are dissolving, and we’re entering an era of AI-augmented creativity that will both accelerate innovation and democratize entrepreneurship.”
Erik Noyes, co-creator of The Generator, Babson’s AI lab

In our AI lab at Babson, we’re designing new approaches to prototyping where students can 3D print a new product concept “extracted” from a 2D text-to-image model, such as OpenAI’s Dall-E or Midjourney. Soon enough, I expect, students will only need to describe a prototype they wish to create, and AI tools will help rapidly embody those ideas in a voice-to-prototype experience.

The barriers between the digital and physical world are dissolving, and we’re entering an era of AI-augmented creativity that will both accelerate innovation and democratize entrepreneurship. I see the advances, quarter by quarter, across all areas of AI.

To stay ahead of the curve, entrepreneurs must embrace AI as a tool for understanding their customers more thoroughly. By leveraging the right AI tools and platforms, entrepreneurs can gain deep insights into customer needs, preferences and sentiment. Armed with this knowledge, they can make data-driven decisions, iterate more quickly and ultimately build products and services that truly resonate with their customers. The future belongs to entrepreneurs who can harness the power of AI to build customer-centric businesses.

Erik Noyes is the Michael London and Stephen H. Kramer Term Chair in Entrepreneurship at Babson College and leads its interdisciplinary AI lab, The Generator. His research examines entrepreneurial thinking, AI-enabled innovation and disruptive innovation in both startups and new corporate ventures.

Posted in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Insights

Tagged Entrepreneurship, Faculty, Technology, Artificial Intelligence

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