Great AI Isn’t Enough: Getting from Lab to Market
There’s no shortage of conversation about AI right now. But building something technically impressive and building something a customer is willing—and able—to adopt are two very different things.
That was the focus of Scaling Intelligence: The Cloud-to-Market Pipeline, a session at the Lab2Market Summit featuring Anthony Pitfield, Senior Go-To-Market Lead for Data and AI at AWS Canada, and Martha White, CTO and Co-founder of RL Core Technologies and Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. Edmonton Unlimited COO Sangeet Brar moderated the conversation.
A lot of the discussion came back to a fairly simple idea: go after the hard problems.
There are plenty of generic AI tools already in the market. For founders and researchers thinking about commercialization, the bigger opportunity may be in the problems that aren’t easy to solve—the ones tied to a specific industry, physical environment or operational challenge. That often means working with data that is unique to an organization and understanding the problem deeply enough to build something that creates real value.
Of course, solving the problem is only one part of getting someone to use what you’ve built.
For enterprise customers, the biggest barriers to adopting AI aren’t always about whether the technology works. Procurement, security, compliance and governance can add months to the process. Something as seemingly straightforward as establishing the right cloud environment can become a significant part of the journey.
That’s worth understanding early. If you’re building for enterprise, you’re not just building the product. You need to understand what has to happen inside your customer’s organization before they can say yes.
The conversation also turned closer to home.
Alberta has an incredible foundation in AI research and technical talent, including what has been built through the University of Alberta. But having that talent here doesn’t automatically mean the companies that emerge from it will grow here.
We need more experienced sales and product talent around those companies, but we also need more opportunities for them to find their first customers close to home. That includes our public institutions.
There’s a meaningful difference between saying we support local innovation and being willing to become an early customer of it. For an Alberta company trying to enter a global market, having a credible customer and reference in its own backyard can matter.
Perhaps that was the bigger takeaway from the session. The path from lab to market isn’t a straight line, and great technology alone doesn’t get you there.
You need to solve something that matters. You need to understand how your customer actually buys. And sometimes, we need to get better at giving the companies being built here the opportunity to prove what they can do here first.