7.1.2. AI in the Lifecycle and Automation
💡 First Principle: AI assists throughout the product and service development lifecycle — and one of its biggest contributions is automating activities across those lifecycle stages, freeing people for judgment-heavy work.
AI can assist in the product and service development lifecycle in many ways: helping discover by analysing demand and market data, helping design by generating options, helping build through code assistance, helping operate by detecting anomalies, and helping support by handling routine requests. A major theme is automation: AI can automate processes throughout the lifecycle activities — handling repetitive, high-volume, or pattern-based work — which connects directly to the "optimize and automate" guiding principle (optimize first, then let AI automate).
⚠️ Exam Trap: AI's role here is to assist and automate across the whole lifecycle, not just one stage. And automation via AI still follows "optimize and automate" — automating a bad process with AI just produces bad results faster.
Reflection Question: Give one example of AI assisting a lifecycle activity, and explain how it connects to "optimize and automate."
