The four opportunity areas for AI in product teams
Not all AI opportunities are equal. Understanding the four distinct areas where AI creates value helps teams focus on what matters — and avoid wasting effort on the wrong bets.
28 February 2025 · 3 min read
Most conversations about AI in organisations quickly become abstract. “We need an AI strategy.” “We should be using AI across the business.” These statements are true but unhelpful — they do not tell anyone what to actually do.
A more useful frame is to think about four distinct areas where AI can create value. Each has a different character, different ROI profile, and different strategic importance.
Area 1: Internal operations
This is how you produce your product. The AI opportunities here are primarily about efficiency and cost reduction: automated testing, AI-assisted code review, documentation generation, incident detection, and internal reporting.
This is the lowest-hanging fruit and the right place to start for most organisations. The gains are real, measurable, and relatively low-risk.
But here is the important caveat: efficiency gains in internal operations do not create competitive advantage on their own. If everyone can produce software 40% faster, the advantage disappears. The real question is what you do with the time and cost you have recovered.
Area 2: How customers use your product
This is where AI directly touches the customer experience. Personalisation, intelligent recommendations, adaptive interfaces, AI-powered search, proactive support — these are features that change how your customers interact with your product.
Done well, these create real differentiation. But they require a deep understanding of what customers are actually trying to accomplish — not just what they ask for. This is where Jobs to Be Done thinking becomes essential.
Area 3: How customers serve their customers
This is the most underexplored area and often the most strategically valuable. The question here is: how can your product help your customers use AI to serve their customers better?
If you are a fintech serving mortgage brokers, what AI capabilities would help those brokers serve their clients better? If you are an HR platform, what AI tools would help HR managers deliver better experiences to their employees?
Organisations that answer this question well create products that become essential infrastructure for their customers — not just tools they use, but capabilities they depend on.
Area 4: How customers interact with suppliers and partners
This fourth area is even more overlooked. It covers how your customers manage their upstream relationships — suppliers, contractors, distribution partners, professional services firms.
AI here can transform procurement, supply chain coordination, partner onboarding, and regulatory compliance. For B2B products in particular, this can be a significant source of differentiation.
Applying the framework
The practical value of this framework is not in understanding the four areas intellectually — it is in using them to structure your discovery process.
When we work with organisations on AI strategy, we map their current initiatives and backlog against these four areas. Almost universally, we find 80% of effort concentrated in Area 1 and the beginning of Area 2 — and almost nothing in Areas 3 and 4.
That is not wrong. Area 1 is the right place to start. But it should not be where you stay.
The organisations building enduring advantage are the ones investing in all four — using Area 1 gains to fund investment in Areas 3 and 4, where the real strategic differentiation lives.
Want to talk through this?
Book a free discovery call with the Berst Consulting team.