Necessity is the Mother of Innovation: Why Scaling Beats Reinventing in the Era of AI Innovation

18th November 2024

by Lewis Gallagher

For years, we’ve clung to the idea that invention—making something brand new—is the ultimate driver of success. But in today’s fast-moving world, maybe that’s not quite right?

Necessity isn’t just the mother of invention; it’s also the mother of innovation. And innovation, more often than not, is about taking what we already have and making it exponentially better, faster and more valuable.

Innovation in an artificial intelligence (AI) era has evolved, harnessing advanced technologies that transform existing solutions into intelligent, adaptive systems that meet our ever-changing needs.

Era of AI Innovation

As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors are scrambling to promote how their products and services incorporate it. Often, what they refer to as “AI” is a well-established subset technology, like machine-learning.

Let’s get real: In the world of AI innovation, the most transformative companies aren’t necessarily the ones inventing flashy, brand-new technologies. They’re the ones creatively using AI to scale and optimise the assets, processes and data that they already have. They’re the ones asking, “How can we reimagine our existing resources to solve today’s problems?”.

For example, if your business has years of customer data, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Innovation in AI era means that you can unleash insights from that data, creating personalised experiences, streamlining operations and driving profits—all without inventing anything new.

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The real magic happens when you innovate by reimagining and scaling, not by starting over.

Lewis Gallagher

Senior Solutions Consultant, Netcall

Invention vs. innovation: The difference within

Aspect

Invention

Innovation

Goal

To create something entirely new

To improve and optimise what exists

Focus

Building from scratch

Applying existing resources creatively

Time & Resources

Resource-intensive, often uncertain outcomes

Often requires fewer resources, focuses on impact

Risk Level

High: Unknowns and untested concepts

Moderate: Built on proven foundations

AI’s Role

May inspire new technologies but with high costs

Enables scalability and deeper insights from current data

Results

May inspire new technologies but with high costs

Enables scalability and deeper insights from current data

AI innovation

So, here’s the real question: Are you innovating, or are you just caught up in the purgatory of inventing something “new”? Don’t let the obsession with novelty make you miss out on what’s right in front of you.

The world’s most successful companies are the ones scaling smartly, not endlessly reinventing.

AI doesn’t just enable invention—it accelerates AI innovation. Look at what you already have. The future of your business might not be about what’s next, but about how you scale what’s already working.

Ready to rethink your approach? Embrace the power of innovation over invention, and let AI help you scale your success. Our intelligent automation platform, Liberty AI, is infused with business-ready AI – putting safe and simple-to-use capabilities in your hands.

Liberty delivers AI with impact – bridging the gap between abstract ideas and business value. Use it to deliver immediate benefits for your teams, customers and stakeholders, while creating an AI strategy that will give you the edge. The power of AI can be deployed – simply and safely – at your command. You don’t need to be a technology specialist or a data scientist. Enable your business to move faster, adapting more easily to new challenges and opportunities. You’ll soon see a wealth of benefits.

Now you can accelerate process-centric workflows and energise customer-centric engagement.

AI Innovation

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