►► Innovation Management Watch Summary: “How AI Is Changing Innovation: Why Speed Alone Isn’t a Strategy” by Harvard Business Review

Artificial intelligence is dramatically reducing the time and cost required to build, test, and iterate on new ideas. But as experimentation becomes faster and more accessible, speed alone may no longer be a source of competitive advantage. 

In a recent Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Cisco, explains that AI is creating a new environment of abundance for innovation. Organizations can now generate code, prototypes, research, and ideas at a pace that was previously impossible. As a result, the challenge is increasingly shifting from whether an organization can build something to whether it should. 

Patel argues that when organizations can produce almost unlimited amounts of code and content, choosing what not to build becomes just as important as deciding what to pursue. Human judgment, intuition, strategic focus, and the ability to recognize quality therefore become more important—not less—as AI capabilities improve. 

This also changes where innovation bottlenecks appear. As AI accelerates coding, for example, code review can become the constraint. As review itself becomes increasingly automated, deciding what deserves resources and attention becomes the next bottleneck. AI can increase throughput, but innovation leaders still need to ensure that greater output translates into better outcomes. 

Cisco’s own experience demonstrates how dramatically this can change the pace of innovation. Patel describes the company’s effort to create a unified management platform across an organization shaped by roughly 250 acquisitions. A project initially expected to require six to nine years was completed by a focused team in approximately nine months with the help of AI. According to Patel, this illustrates how AI can fundamentally change an organization’s “clock speed.” 

However, faster technology does not automatically create an AI-powered organization. Patel identifies culture as one of the hardest elements to change. Employees need to feel comfortable experimenting, learning continuously, and revisiting AI capabilities as they rapidly improve. Organizations must also maintain human accountability, appropriate security guardrails, and thoughtful review rather than simply delegating work to AI. 

The key takeaway for innovation leaders: As access to powerful AI tools becomes increasingly widespread, simply having the technology will not differentiate one organization from another. Competitive advantage will depend on how effectively leaders direct these new capabilities—choosing the right problems, allocating resources wisely, maintaining quality and accountability, and turning faster experimentation into meaningful outcomes. 

Welcome to the latest in our series of Innovation Management Watch summaries, where we highlight relevant insights and developments shaping innovation management today. 

This summary is based on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, “How AI Is Changing Innovation: Why Speed Alone Isn’t a Strategy,” featuring Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Cisco. All rights and original content belong to Harvard Business Review and the respective authors and speakers.