- The speaker, a former Harvard Business School professor, discusses the common approach to digital disruption among startups like Facebook and Airbnb
- He explains the concept of decoupling the customer value chain using Uber as an example
- There are three types of decoupling: value creating, value eroding, and value capturing activities
- Investors tend to value startups that focus on value creating decoupling
- Decoupling can lead to rapid growth and expansion of a startup's business
- However, there is no guarantee of financial success, and entrepreneurs may need to pivot and learn the economics of their business
- The recipe for decoupling involves 5 steps, including mapping out the customer value chain.

- PillPack identified the complicated process of buying and consuming multiple pills per day
- They mapped out the customer value chain and classified activities as value creating, capturing, or eroding
- They identified the weak link in the process and created a subscription service to address it
- They disrupted the market and were eventually purchased by Amazon for over a billion dollars
- The key to disrupting a market is identifying the weakest link in the customer value chain and building a business around it
- Opportunities for decoupling arise when customers are unhappy due to high costs, long wait times, or excessive effort
- AI can be a valuable tool for reducing costs, time, and effort in customer activities
- The advice is to read the book, internalize the concepts, and apply them to an industry before creating something new.

Today's video features Thales S. Teixeira, V. Associate Professor at the University of California. Previously, he taught students at Harvard Business School for over 10 years. In his book, he explains how existing businesses can identify points where they fail to create value and offers methods to provide high value to customers. He examines the customer value chain, proposing a framework to identify and break apart the weakest link. He teaches how to generate ideas that offer high value to customers and how to attract customers away from established players with those ideas.

To purchase his book: https://a.co/d/hkoaHzs

00:00 Intro
00:52 Chapter 1. Decoupling Customer Value Chain
04:03 Chapter 2. 3 Types of Decoupling
09:40 Chapter 3. 5 Steps to Steal Customers
16:21 Chapter 4. Decoupling in AI Field

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While I was a professor at the Harvard Business School, I was invited to give talks to many startups like Facebook, like Airbnb.

They all operated in different industries, but they all thought about it in a very, very similar fashion.

And I realized there was a common approach to this digital disruption.

I did not know or understand or was not written before.

I'm a professor at the University of California.

I was for 10 years a professor at the Harvard Business School.

After you watch this video, I hope that you will understand the process of digital disruption or creating high-growth startup can be engineered It can be designed and if you follow the tools and approaches You will be much more successful at creating a digital startup than if you just follow your intuition or think of it in a very unstructured fashion.

So 1 example of decoupling the customer value chain, we can identify it with ride sharing.

So before ride sharing existed and Uber was 1 of the first ones, if you needed to get a taxi to the airport, basically you would have to go to the street and try to hail a taxi cab or you would call a dispatcher to get that.

The challenge was that is that there might be across the street from you a few streets down there might be lots of taxes waiting and but none in your street and so when uber came out it came out with the idea of facilitating this process of matchmaking riders with drivers Uber realized that there are enough drivers in the market.

The problem was that some people didn't know where to get a car and some drivers didn't know where to get passengers.

So Uber looked at the customer value chain, all the activities that people required to do in order to get a car service to take them to a place like the airport.

After understanding the case of Uber, what you need to understand is this process is much more common than you would imagine.

And to really understand how common it is, you need to understand what is the customer value chain.

And this is what I teach Harvard students and University of California students in the first day of an MBA course.

The customer value chain are the series of activities that we as customers are required to do in order to acquire, use, and dispose of goods and services.

So for instance, if you want to get a checking account, You need to look at all of the available options of banks that can offer you a checking account.

Then you go to a bank branch and then you apply for a checking account, you provide documents, and then they'll give you a checkbook and other materials so you can open an account, have a checking number.

All of these are steps in the customer's value chain.

After an early stage founder maps out the customer value chain, the next step is identifying the weak link in the customer value chain.

What the activities that in the market customers are having to do with established companies, but that they are very unsatisfied with.

So the next step is really looking at an opportunity to steal that activity.

Decoupling is the breaking of the links of the customer value chain, often by a digital player that has been historically provided together by established companies.

When we go back to the case of Uber or Cacao or many other ride sharing companies around the world, there's a variety of weak links or activities that established companies, in this case taxi cabs, do very badly.

Where the cars, the drivers, and the riders are going to meet.

In this case, decoupling happened by looking at the opportunity to matchmake better and provide peace of mind for passengers that they'll get their car.

So once Uber decided to do that, it stole customers from the established companies, the taxi companies, and it grew and started providing more and more activities over time and this is the process of decoupling.

So how many different types of decoupling are there?

Well, as I just explained to you that in any customer value chain there are only 3 types of activity, value creating activity, value capturing activity, and value eroding activity, by definition, there can only be 3 types of disruption through decoupling.

The first 1 is decoupling a value creating activity.

So I'll give you examples of these 3 in the video game industry.

Twitch basically gives you the opportunity if you go to their website, you go and you look at the list of video games and you click all 1 1, and you go to a chat room that you see somebody from around the world playing that video game that you chose.

You can interact with the person who's playing the game or you can interact with other people in the chat room but what you cannot do is play the video game.

So what Twitch realized is that something that we all know, playing a video game is a value-creating activity, but watching somebody else play, somebody who plays very well or somebody who's very entertaining, is also a value-creating activity.

And Twitch broke apart this and decided to offer to consumers, to users, just the value creating part of watching somebody play the game.

The second type is breaking apart value eroding activity.

If you, in the past many years ago, if you wanted to play a game, buy it, or rent it, you would have to go to the store or have to go to the video game rental shop.

And you would go there and you get the media come back home and play it.

That activity of going there, choosing and coming back is a value eroding activity.

And so Steam was another startup that came out with the idea of we will stream all the video games.

So you go online just like Netflix and you stream the video game and then type number 3 which is decoupling value capturing activities is this idea that has become the standard of mobile games which is the freemium model.

You can play the game without having to buy the game.

Before you needed to buy the game you can decouple those activities and just play the game until you realize that you like it, you can buy the game afterwards, or you can spend money on virtual items.

Fortnite is 1 of the biggest examples of decoupling value capture activity from a value creating activity of playing the game.

So As I've researched in a variety of industries, in a variety of countries, what are the value of these companies that are disrupting with value creating decoupling, value eroding decoupling, and value capturing decoupling, I started to see, identify what is the valuation of these startups at any point in time.

And what I realized that investors, venture capitalists, tend to value much more the value creating decouplers than the other 2.

That doesn't mean that they can't grow tremendously.

It just means that investors prefer startup founders that are trying to decouple through the process of separating value creating activities.

So the impact of decoupling on customers becomes very, very strong.

When customers get the feeling for decoupling their customer value chain, they know that there's a startup that is providing with a lot of focus, 1 activity much better than other established companies.

In the case of Uber or in the case of Syntex that are providing digital solutions to consumers, these businesses quickly attract consumers that were unsatisfied, they grow really fast, and they start looking at other opportunities for expansion of their business.

This other opportunity, as I've identified it, it invariably becomes defined as looking at adjacent activities in the customer value chain and growing outwards.

Coupling is the adding of additional activities in the customer value chain after you did the process of decoupling as a startup.

So in the case of Uber, Uber first started with, we will provide you rides.

And then Uber said, we will provide you with delivery of food and then we will provide you with delivery of packages.

And so Uber grew outwards in the process coupling, adding more on activities that it was stealing from other established companies in the market.

When I teach my courses to MBA students in the United States, the students immediately realize that just because you can disrupt an industry or you can decouple, that is no guarantee that you will actually be financially rewarded.

Unfortunately, sometimes there's no way to predict whether you will be able to find a profitable formula, a profitable business model, by providing value to your customers, as well as capturing some of this value for yourself in excess of the costs that you have to incur in order to provide value.

Consequences, oftentimes entrepreneurs have to build a business, scale the business, learn the economics, and then answer the question, will I be able to make money?

Will I be able to make a profitable business in the long term or not?

You have to try it, you have to have conviction, sometimes you have to pivot, but there is no fundamental rule of business that says if you provide value to customers you get a chance to capture value to be profitable.

The recipe for decoupling involves 5 steps.

The first step is mapping out the customer value chain.

Very close to where I lived in Boston, there was a startup called PillPack.

And what PillPack realized is that if you have to buy and consume many pills per day, It's a very complicated process.

And they mapped out the customer value chain as going to the doctor, getting tested, receiving a prescription, then going to the pharmacy, paying for the medication.

And then once you figure out all of this, you have to create a plan to remember what time of day to take the medication, then you take the medication and hopefully at the end you'll feel better, you will solve your health problem.

Step 2 is each of these stages in the customer value chain you need to classify it into value creating, value capturing, value eroding.

So in the case of PillPack, taking the medication is value creating to become healthy.

But pretty much everything else is value eroding activity.

Going to the doctor, value eroding, getting a prescription, value eroding, going to the pharmacy, filling out, remembering when to take what, all these things are value-roding.

We have to do it to get the benefit of taking the pills, but in and of themselves, they don't create value for the customer.

And then obviously paying for the doctor's visit and paying for the medication is a value capturing activity.

The third step is identifying the weak link.

A weak link again, is that activity that customers have to do, but they're not happy with the way they have to do it.

And in this case of pill pack, what they realize is 1 of the big challenges, particularly for elderly people that consume many pills per day is creating this Organization scheme that tells them when they should take each pill when they should separate pills that they should not take together And remember to do that Step 4 is actually breaking apart the customer value chain and stealing that activity which in the case of Piltpak means Piltpak needed to create a way that they could do this activity on behalf of customers so customers wouldn't have to do it.

They created a subscription service in which you would send or the doctor would send directly the prescription to the startup.

They would buy the pills and they would put the pills in little sachets, little plastic containers that were formed into a roll.

And every day you would pull the roll out and then you take the medication together.

And then after that you throw out and another sachet of the roll would come out.

And then lastly, the fifth step is once you decouple a process, remember you're stealing an activity from established players, what we call the incumbents.

And so the established players, both the makers of medication, as well as the sellers, the pharmacies, might want to respond in certain way.

And it turns out in my book, I show that most of the responses of established companies to decoupling are very predictable.

So the fifth step is understanding what likely is going to happen and preempt the response.

The challenge is that pharmacies also could have emulated or copied PillPack and did the same thing for their customers.

But as PillPack realized, pharmacies have no motivation to do that because if pharmacies start sending medication to people's home by prescription, then what's going to happen is less people are going to go to the pharmacy.

And the business model of a pharmacy today is getting you in the door to buy medication and buying a variety of other things.

So the consequence was that PillPack realized that it didn't have this strong response from pharmacies to emulate, and that allowed the company to grow faster.

And a few years later, Amazon purchased PillPack for more than a billion dollars.

The most important step in understanding decoupling in order to create a startup to disrupt the market is really identifying that weakest link in the customer value chain.

That's the best opportunity that you'll have to build a business that will most easily steal customers from big established companies.

That weakest link is the moment in the process of purchasing something that customers are most unsatisfied.

So to give an example in the insurance industry, whether you are buying life insurance, health insurance, or car insurance, nobody likes this process.

Nobody wakes up excited about having to buy or repurchase or change their insurance policy.

But even in this process, which is very complex to acquire insurance, 1 of the worst parts of the process is comparing across insurance policies for different companies.

Many entrepreneurs realized this all around the world and created a wave of disruption called insure tech.

And insure techs try to facilitate the process of comparing and choosing and signing up for insurance.

Again, they realized the weakest link in the customer value chain for a certain industry, and they built a business around this process in order to help customers compare insurance policies across different companies.

And by doing so, they created a lot of value for consumers and they built businesses that grow really quickly.

When we think about customers, new opportunities arise when customers are changing their behavior.

Either because they change their needs and wants, or because they have unfulfilled needs and wants, we start identifying opportunities for decoupling in certain markets.

When customers are unhappy, we've learned over time that customers tend to be unhappy because of 3 factors.

The first factor is they often find an activity expensive to do.

Going back to the insurance industry, many established insurance companies require you to go talk to insurance agents.

Well, you have to get in a car or get into the public transportation and you have to go there and see them.

And that's probably expensive, why couldn't you just do it online?

The other element is when customers are unhappy because it takes a long time to do something.

So in the example of getting a credit card, if it takes 2 days to submit document and getting approval and then 2 or 3 more days to receive a credit card, customers are unhappy with that.

And then the third element is when customers are unhappy because it's a lot of effort to do some.

So going out, getting a DVD for a video game or a movie, now people just want to do the streaming which is pretty much low or no effort.

So once we look at markets and we see rising costs of money, time or effort to do a certain activity, that is when we see evolving opportunities for decoupling to come into play.

AI, and particularly generative AI, have become extremely faddish and successful and growing.

What we're seeing is both established companies are trying to find use cases for AI and generative AI, and startup founders are thinking of opportunities of how to use this tool.

Now, it's important to know that, number 1, AI is a general purpose tool.

It can be applied in a variety of different scenarios, instances, and use cases, just like the computer, just like the internet.

If you don't know how to apply it correctly, you might be applying it to some activity that will create very little value for the customer.

So it's very important to identify activities in which AI can be a tool to really increase value to customers by making, again, cheaper, faster, or easier to do a certain activity.

So I would suggest to you, if you're thinking about applying AI for your business, if you have a startup or established business, really make sure that you identify that customers are unhappy with an activity.

They're paying these costs in excess of what they think they should be paying and by using AI you can in effect help them reduce how much money, how much time, or how much effort they take to execute that activity.

If you learned about decoupling the customer value chain for the first time with this video.

My advice to you is really to read my book, internalize the concepts, and then start trying to apply it to an industry that you know very well.

Sometimes before you create something new, it's nice to apply the methods and the frameworks by recreating something that you already know.

So go ahead, try it out and try to recreate that business model using the tools of decoupling and unlocking the customer value chain before you think about trying to identify a new business model in an industry you probably don't know very well.


Speaker 0: While I was a professor at the Harvard Business School, I was invited to give talks to many startups like Facebook, like Airbnb. They all operated in different industries, but they all thought about it in a very, very similar fashion. And I realized there was a common approach to this digital disruption. I did not know or understand or was not written before. Hi, my name is Talis Tashira.

I'm a professor at the University of California. I was for 10 years a professor at the Harvard Business School. After you watch this video, I hope that you will understand the process of digital disruption or creating high-growth startup can be engineered It can be designed and if you follow the tools and approaches You will be much more successful at creating a digital startup than if you just follow your intuition or think of it in a very unstructured fashion. So 1 example of decoupling the customer value chain, we can identify it with ride sharing. So before ride sharing existed and Uber was 1 of the first ones, if you needed to get a taxi to the airport, basically you would have to go to the street and try to hail a taxi cab or you would call a dispatcher to get that.

The challenge was that is that there might be across the street from you a few streets down there might be lots of taxes waiting and but none in your street and so when uber came out it came out with the idea of facilitating this process of matchmaking riders with drivers Uber realized that there are enough drivers in the market. There are enough cars in the market. The problem was that some people didn't know where to get a car and some drivers didn't know where to get passengers. So Uber looked at the customer value chain, all the activities that people required to do in order to get a car service to take them to a place like the airport. After understanding the case of Uber, what you need to understand is this process is much more common than you would imagine.

And to really understand how common it is, you need to understand what is the customer value chain. And this is what I teach Harvard students and University of California students in the first day of an MBA course. The customer value chain are the series of activities that we as customers are required to do in order to acquire, use, and dispose of goods and services. So for instance, if you want to get a checking account, You need to look at all of the available options of banks that can offer you a checking account. Then you go to a bank branch and then you apply for a checking account, you provide documents, and then they'll give you a checkbook and other materials so you can open an account, have a checking number.

All of these are steps in the customer's value chain. After an early stage founder maps out the customer value chain, the next step is identifying the weak link in the customer value chain. What the activities that in the market customers are having to do with established companies, but that they are very unsatisfied with. So the next step is really looking at an opportunity to steal that activity. And this is what's called decoupling.

So how do I define decoupling? Decoupling is the breaking of the links of the customer value chain, often by a digital player that has been historically provided together by established companies. When we go back to the case of Uber or Cacao or many other ride sharing companies around the world, there's a variety of weak links or activities that established companies, in this case taxi cabs, do very badly. Where the cars, the drivers, and the riders are going to meet. In this case, decoupling happened by looking at the opportunity to matchmake better and provide peace of mind for passengers that they'll get their car.

So once Uber decided to do that, it stole customers from the established companies, the taxi companies, and it grew and started providing more and more activities over time and this is the process of decoupling. So how many different types of decoupling are there? Well, as I just explained to you that in any customer value chain there are only 3 types of activity, value creating activity, value capturing activity, and value eroding activity, by definition, there can only be 3 types of disruption through decoupling. The first 1 is decoupling a value creating activity. So I'll give you examples of these 3 in the video game industry.

So Twitch is a very interesting startup. Twitch basically gives you the opportunity if you go to their website, you go and you look at the list of video games and you click all 1 1, and you go to a chat room that you see somebody from around the world playing that video game that you chose. You can interact with the person who's playing the game or you can interact with other people in the chat room but what you cannot do is play the video game. So what Twitch realized is that something that we all know, playing a video game is a value-creating activity, but watching somebody else play, somebody who plays very well or somebody who's very entertaining, is also a value-creating activity. And Twitch broke apart this and decided to offer to consumers, to users, just the value creating part of watching somebody play the game.

The second type is breaking apart value eroding activity. If you, in the past many years ago, if you wanted to play a game, buy it, or rent it, you would have to go to the store or have to go to the video game rental shop. And you would go there and you get the media come back home and play it. That activity of going there, choosing and coming back is a value eroding activity. Most people don't like to do it.

And so Steam was another startup that came out with the idea of we will stream all the video games. So you go online just like Netflix and you stream the video game and then type number 3 which is decoupling value capturing activities is this idea that has become the standard of mobile games which is the freemium model. You can play the game without having to buy the game. Before you needed to buy the game you can decouple those activities and just play the game until you realize that you like it, you can buy the game afterwards, or you can spend money on virtual items. Fortnite is 1 of the biggest examples of decoupling value capture activity from a value creating activity of playing the game.

So As I've researched in a variety of industries, in a variety of countries, what are the value of these companies that are disrupting with value creating decoupling, value eroding decoupling, and value capturing decoupling, I started to see, identify what is the valuation of these startups at any point in time. And what I realized that investors, venture capitalists, tend to value much more the value creating decouplers than the other 2. That doesn't mean that they can't grow tremendously. It just means that investors prefer startup founders that are trying to decouple through the process of separating value creating activities. So the impact of decoupling on customers becomes very, very strong.

When customers get the feeling for decoupling their customer value chain, they know that there's a startup that is providing with a lot of focus, 1 activity much better than other established companies. In the case of Uber or in the case of Syntex that are providing digital solutions to consumers, these businesses quickly attract consumers that were unsatisfied, they grow really fast, and they start looking at other opportunities for expansion of their business. This other opportunity, as I've identified it, it invariably becomes defined as looking at adjacent activities in the customer value chain and growing outwards. In this, in my book, I call it coupling. Coupling is the adding of additional activities in the customer value chain after you did the process of decoupling as a startup.

So in the case of Uber, Uber first started with, we will provide you rides. And then Uber said, we will provide you with delivery of food and then we will provide you with delivery of packages. And so Uber grew outwards in the process coupling, adding more on activities that it was stealing from other established companies in the market. When I teach my courses to MBA students in the United States, the students immediately realize that just because you can disrupt an industry or you can decouple, that is no guarantee that you will actually be financially rewarded. So that's a very powerful insight.

Unfortunately, sometimes there's no way to predict whether you will be able to find a profitable formula, a profitable business model, by providing value to your customers, as well as capturing some of this value for yourself in excess of the costs that you have to incur in order to provide value. Consequences, oftentimes entrepreneurs have to build a business, scale the business, learn the economics, and then answer the question, will I be able to make money? Will I be able to make a profitable business in the long term or not? You have to try it, you have to have conviction, sometimes you have to pivot, but there is no fundamental rule of business that says if you provide value to customers you get a chance to capture value to be profitable. The recipe for decoupling involves 5 steps.

The first step is mapping out the customer value chain. Very close to where I lived in Boston, there was a startup called PillPack. And what PillPack realized is that if you have to buy and consume many pills per day, It's a very complicated process. And they mapped out the customer value chain as going to the doctor, getting tested, receiving a prescription, then going to the pharmacy, paying for the medication. And then once you figure out all of this, you have to create a plan to remember what time of day to take the medication, then you take the medication and hopefully at the end you'll feel better, you will solve your health problem.

Step 2 is each of these stages in the customer value chain you need to classify it into value creating, value capturing, value eroding. So in the case of PillPack, taking the medication is value creating to become healthy. But pretty much everything else is value eroding activity. Going to the doctor, value eroding, getting a prescription, value eroding, going to the pharmacy, filling out, remembering when to take what, all these things are value-roding. We have to do it to get the benefit of taking the pills, but in and of themselves, they don't create value for the customer.

And then obviously paying for the doctor's visit and paying for the medication is a value capturing activity. The third step is identifying the weak link. A weak link again, is that activity that customers have to do, but they're not happy with the way they have to do it. And in this case of pill pack, what they realize is 1 of the big challenges, particularly for elderly people that consume many pills per day is creating this Organization scheme that tells them when they should take each pill when they should separate pills that they should not take together And remember to do that Step 4 is actually breaking apart the customer value chain and stealing that activity which in the case of Piltpak means Piltpak needed to create a way that they could do this activity on behalf of customers so customers wouldn't have to do it. How did they decide to do that?

They created a subscription service in which you would send or the doctor would send directly the prescription to the startup. They would buy the pills and they would put the pills in little sachets, little plastic containers that were formed into a roll. And every day you would pull the roll out and then you take the medication together. And then after that you throw out and another sachet of the roll would come out. And then lastly, the fifth step is once you decouple a process, remember you're stealing an activity from established players, what we call the incumbents.

And so the established players, both the makers of medication, as well as the sellers, the pharmacies, might want to respond in certain way. And it turns out in my book, I show that most of the responses of established companies to decoupling are very predictable. So the fifth step is understanding what likely is going to happen and preempt the response. The challenge is that pharmacies also could have emulated or copied PillPack and did the same thing for their customers. But as PillPack realized, pharmacies have no motivation to do that because if pharmacies start sending medication to people's home by prescription, then what's going to happen is less people are going to go to the pharmacy.

And the business model of a pharmacy today is getting you in the door to buy medication and buying a variety of other things. So the consequence was that PillPack realized that it didn't have this strong response from pharmacies to emulate, and that allowed the company to grow faster. And a few years later, Amazon purchased PillPack for more than a billion dollars. The most important step in understanding decoupling in order to create a startup to disrupt the market is really identifying that weakest link in the customer value chain. That's the best opportunity that you'll have to build a business that will most easily steal customers from big established companies.

That weakest link is the moment in the process of purchasing something that customers are most unsatisfied. So to give an example in the insurance industry, whether you are buying life insurance, health insurance, or car insurance, nobody likes this process. Nobody wakes up excited about having to buy or repurchase or change their insurance policy. But even in this process, which is very complex to acquire insurance, 1 of the worst parts of the process is comparing across insurance policies for different companies. Many entrepreneurs realized this all around the world and created a wave of disruption called insure tech.

And insure techs try to facilitate the process of comparing and choosing and signing up for insurance. Again, they realized the weakest link in the customer value chain for a certain industry, and they built a business around this process in order to help customers compare insurance policies across different companies. And by doing so, they created a lot of value for consumers and they built businesses that grow really quickly. When we think about customers, new opportunities arise when customers are changing their behavior. Either because they change their needs and wants, or because they have unfulfilled needs and wants, we start identifying opportunities for decoupling in certain markets.

When customers are unhappy, we've learned over time that customers tend to be unhappy because of 3 factors. The first factor is they often find an activity expensive to do. Going back to the insurance industry, many established insurance companies require you to go talk to insurance agents. Well, you have to get in a car or get into the public transportation and you have to go there and see them. And that's probably expensive, why couldn't you just do it online?

The other element is when customers are unhappy because it takes a long time to do something. So in the example of getting a credit card, if it takes 2 days to submit document and getting approval and then 2 or 3 more days to receive a credit card, customers are unhappy with that. And then the third element is when customers are unhappy because it's a lot of effort to do some. So going out, getting a DVD for a video game or a movie, now people just want to do the streaming which is pretty much low or no effort. So once we look at markets and we see rising costs of money, time or effort to do a certain activity, that is when we see evolving opportunities for decoupling to come into play.

AI, and particularly generative AI, have become extremely faddish and successful and growing. What we're seeing is both established companies are trying to find use cases for AI and generative AI, and startup founders are thinking of opportunities of how to use this tool. Now, it's important to know that, number 1, AI is a general purpose tool. It can be applied in a variety of different scenarios, instances, and use cases, just like the computer, just like the internet. That lies the problem.

If you don't know how to apply it correctly, you might be applying it to some activity that will create very little value for the customer. So it's very important to identify activities in which AI can be a tool to really increase value to customers by making, again, cheaper, faster, or easier to do a certain activity. So I would suggest to you, if you're thinking about applying AI for your business, if you have a startup or established business, really make sure that you identify that customers are unhappy with an activity. They're paying these costs in excess of what they think they should be paying and by using AI you can in effect help them reduce how much money, how much time, or how much effort they take to execute that activity. If you learned about decoupling the customer value chain for the first time with this video.

My advice to you is really to read my book, internalize the concepts, and then start trying to apply it to an industry that you know very well. Sometimes before you create something new, it's nice to apply the methods and the frameworks by recreating something that you already know. So go ahead, try it out and try to recreate that business model using the tools of decoupling and unlocking the customer value chain before you think about trying to identify a new business model in an industry you probably don't know very well. I wish you

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