Will AI get to the point where it can predict ROI to prioritize which features to build next?

Taylor Risner
3 replies
Imagine brainstorming with AI on your product roadmap. Can it help surface the most promising features to build based on sentiment captured across the web? Can you train it on your product + customer base to understand which features would add the most incremental value? Can it forecast ROI based on market sizing, conversion rates and competitor offerings?

Replies

Odun Odubanjo
It could definitely provide pointers based on your customer data/feedback and relevant parameters in it. Might need additional services build on top of a platform like GPT for it to work.
Krishna Kumar
The AI that everyone is going gaga over, ChatGPT is a text summarizer. That is it summarizes and answers from a corpus of text that has been fed into it. It cannot answer beyond that. For example ChatGPT has been fed text till 2021 only. Therefore it cannot for example answer who are the semifinalists of the 2022 soccer world cup. In other words, it cannot answer anything for which the answer has not been already fed into it in some form. So, it is currently unlikely that AI will be able to "forecast" ROI of features not yet built. That said, we cannot rule out the development of predictive systems that could in the future do such things.
Richard Gao
With current LLMs, the main issue is that they merely predict the next word in a body of text, and are very good at it, which gives an appearance of having reasoning skills. For example, if you ask "what is 1+1?" it's not actually doing math when it answers "2", It's just predicting that the text string "1+1=" will have "2" after it. It's similar to a preschooler that would memorize the math questions rather than actually learning the math, but it has an excellent memory. True AGI that can actually perform reasoning might be close or far, I'm not sure, but it wouldn't be surprised if it could do ROI analysis. My guess is it will be a multimodal AI that combines a LLM, image generator/detector and multiple linear regression AIs.