I worked on AI products before the current wave made “AI” a distribution strategy of its own. At the time, the technology did not excuse us from the annoying question: does anyone actually need this?
In one case, I worked with one developer to get an AI MVP into customers’ hands in three weeks. The useful part was not that we were early. The useful part was that the experiment was small enough to teach us something without requiring the market to transform first.
There are two very different ways to be early
Early with option value
You invest a bounded amount, learn something competitors do not yet know, build capability that compounds, or establish a position that becomes expensive to copy later. If the market does not move, the company still keeps useful knowledge or technology.
Early with dependency risk
Your success requires customers to change behaviour, regulation to move, infrastructure to mature, buyers to receive new budgets, or an ecosystem to appear. Your product may be excellent and still spend years waiting for conditions you do not control.
Option value leaves you with something useful even if the timing is wrong. Dependency risk leaves you waiting for the world.
What has to become true?
When someone says “the market will be ready,” I want that sentence unpacked. Ready means something observable.
Does a budget category need to exist?
Does customer behaviour need to change?
Does another technology need to become cheap or reliable?
Does regulation need to permit the use case?
Once those conditions are explicit, the company can decide whether it has any ability to influence them. If the answer is no, “strategic patience” can become a flattering name for waiting.
Build early when learning itself compounds
I am comfortable building before the market is obvious when the investment is reversible and the learning is valuable. That might mean testing willingness to pay, discovering data constraints, understanding integration behaviour, or learning which part of the value proposition customers actually care about.
I am much more cautious when the thesis is simply that customers will eventually behave the way our product needs them to behave.