As an early adopter of technology trends, Perpetual has been experimenting with AI tools across our product development process.

While learning more about them, we asked ourselves “What if we took an AI-Native approach, and only used AI to ideate, design and develop a digital product”?

We embarked on the ambitious project of creating and launching a digital product from scratch, deferring to AI at every step of the way. This helped us discover new tools and processes, and to deeply understand what is feasible at each step of the product development lifecycle with AI tools available today. Here’s what we learned.

IDEATE: Business Strategy & Digital Product Management

The ideation phase is where strategic thinking meets creativity. It’s not just about coming up with new ideas but ensuring they are aligned with the market, user needs, and the business goals. We asked key questions: How can this product be monetized? Will it solve real-world problems? How difficult will it be to build? With AI-powered tools for brainstorming and planning, we ensured our ideas were innovative and grounded in data, setting a strong foundation for the product’s success.

1. Product Ideation: AI-driven brainstorming tools like Stratup, Jeda AI and Whimsical AI facilitate collaboration and idea generation, ensuring that product development is guided by innovative thinking.
2. Product Planning: AI-Enabled Trello, Catalist, Aha! AI and Motion assist in roadmap planning, prioritizing tasks and work scheduling.
3. Project Estimation: Estimate AI and Peak.ai provide insights into project risks and budgeting, making it easier to plan and manage resources effectively.
4. Project Management: Asana AI, ClickUp Brain, and Monday AI automate tasks, manage project risks, and streamline communication, making project management more efficient.
5. Product Positioning: Crayon and Mindspeller analyze market trends and customer feedback, helping businesses to position their products effectively in the market.

DESIGN: User Experience & Product Design

Once the strategy is in place, the design phase is all about translating those ideas into a tangible,  user-friendly and visually appealing product. AI tools played a new role in automating our research processes and creating the initial visual framework, while our design team ensured the user experience was intuitive and delightful.

1. User Interviewing: DataRobot and Otter.ai enhance the interviewing process by analyzing data and generating insights that inform the design process.
2. User Experience Research: Miro AI and Dovetail streamline the research process, allowing for faster data collection and analysis, which leads to better-informed design decisions.
3. Design Systems: Visily.ai and Components.ai help create sound and detailed design systems, ensuring they meet current user expectations by finding system crashes in code and suggesting new features.
4. Interface Design: Uizard, Canva Magic Design and Mockplus enable designers to create and iterate on prototypes quickly, reducing the time and cost associated with product development.

DEVELOP: Technology & Software Engineering

The development phase brings the vision to life. By utilizing AI-powered development tools, we optimized coding, testing, and deployment processes. AI helped us anticipate technical challenges, manage resources more efficiently, and accelerate the engineering workflow. Whether it was automating code generation or running real-time performance diagnostics, we combined human expertise with AI's efficiency to create a robust, scalable product.

1. Web App Development: GitHub CoPilot and Adobe Sensei with Adobe Experience Cloud streamline coding and design processes, enabling faster and more efficient web application development.
2. Front-End Development: TeleportHQ and Builder AI automate front-end code generation, transforming design files into clean, responsive HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
3. Back-end development: Tabnine and DeepCode AI powered by Synk assist in writing, optimizing, and debugging back-end code by suggesting functions, detecting errors, and even generating database schemas.
4. System Integration: AI-powered solutions like Zapier and UiPath facilitate seamless integration between different IT systems, improving overall productivity and operational efficiency.
5. DevOps: Harness.io and Azure AI automate key DevOps tasks, like continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), monitoring, and infrastructure management.

To learn more, stay tuned for our WhitePaper on this topic which has further details on this topic.

AI is not just a trend in product development—it’s a transformative force reshaping how we approach and execute the digital creation process. By embracing AI tools, businesses, designers, and engineers can stay ahead of the curve and unlock new levels of efficiency and innovation.

At Perpetual, we pride ourselves on remaining at the forefront of emerging technologies. While there’s a rush to use AI tools that promise end-to-end automation, we believe these tools have yet to fully mature. They offer powerful enhancements to the product development process, but the dream of a completely hands-off approach is still a way off.

For now, our teams use AI to streamline tasks like generating content, brainstorming, design ideation, and co-creating code. AI excels at visual inspiration and summarizing large data sets, but for the rest, the human touch remains essential. As the AI landscape evolves, we’re excited to continue exploring its potential while blending technology with our expertise.