Picture this: After founding your startup, you have your team in place. You can describe your product in your sleep. But now comes the next set of hurdles: commercializing your offering and finding a path into the marketplace.

This is where companies stumble. No matter how innovative the founders may be, entering the consumer landscape takes a different set of skills. All too often, products with great potential don’t make it to market — and lack of knowledge is the key stumbling block.

But with the AI revolution, startups can utilize low-cost AI tools to push them in the right direction and help guide commercialization planning. AI can supplement your knowledge and provide the speed, clarity and objectivity to make informed decisions at this critical point in the life of your business.

Large language models (LLMs) are the most significant AI for commercialization strategy creation. LLMs include programs such as ChatGPT, Iris.ai and Claude. If you’ve used one of these tools, you know that asking questions can yield in-depth answers and help refine your thinking. So, to use an LLM for commercialization, you need to know what to ask and how to ask it.

Consider the initial stage of commercialization: information gathering. Bringing new technologies to market requires extensive research and a significant budget. Assessing patent risk, estimating market size, identifying competitors and drafting investor materials takes significant time and requires experts who are often siloed. The results are strategies that can be biased, inconsistent and inadequate.

AI provides everyone access to a comprehensive set of strategy guidance tools. While AI does not solve all problems, thoughtful LLM use can assist with everything from due diligence to grant writing — freeing valuable time for strategic decisions and relationship building.

Related: Taking Your Product to Market Just Got Way Easier, Thanks to AI

Patent research and risk assessment

One of the most time-consuming tasks in the commercialization process is patent research. As any entrepreneur knows, reviewing thousands of prior patents is equally essential and burdensome. But LLMs are ideal for analyzing vast datasets to find relevant information. AI can now scan the patent landscape, identify related inventions and flag risks like freedom-to-operate conflicts almost instantly. This can reduce research time from weeks to just hours.

Market sizing and segmentation

Manually estimating the total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM) and serviceable obtainable market (SOM) takes weeks of consultant research, internal brainstorming and guesswork. And assumptions built on incomplete data won’t withstand investor scrutiny.

AI tools can access and interpret far more data, far more quickly, than most human analysts. Crucial data, such as demographic, industry-based and behavioral information, can be compiled and summarized by AI to provide a strategic starting point, laying the groundwork for more effective manual analysis and strategy-making. AI can also build TAM/SAM/SOM models and generate charts and visualizations, significantly aiding companies with limited teams and resources. Finally, more advanced LLMs can break down a target market into segments and interpret results based on user data, which you can enter manually.

It’s very important, particularly at this stage, to use the AI properly. Simply asking it to generate a plan is neither strategic nor responsible. Above all, an AI is a tool — and just like a hammer, it’s only as effective as the person using it. You can have the AI hammer away and deliver all kinds of data, but if it hasn’t been directed skillfully, you’ll still end up with the informational equivalent of a dented block of wood. Use AI responsibly and you will come out ahead; use it sloppily and you will get sloppy results. But if you use AI well, you can overcome biases caused by team assumptions or limited data, speed your process and ground your assumptions in extensive sourcing that can justify your strategy to investors.

Related: I Teach AI and Entrepreneurship. Here’s How Entrepreneurs Can Use AI to Better Understand Their Target Customers.

Investor materials and grant narratives

Creating key documents, such as pitch decks, small business innovation research (SBIR) proposals and executive summaries, is an essential but complex task that bedevils all but the best copywriters. AI can help improve brainstorming and writing quality, while laying the groundwork for a final manual polish. Once again, it’s important to understand that AI cannot and should not do it all; you should still have your staff finalize everything. But using an LLM like a conversational partner can simplify the process of getting key details onto the page.

AI is particularly good at drafting one-pagers with engaging narratives that introduce key business details. The back-and-forth nature of working with popular LLMs like ChatGPT can also help shape clear value propositions and introduce new positioning ideas. Finally, AI can help with go-to-market (GTM) strategic outlines. Once this initial AI-driven work is done, compiling it into the final package should be done manually. A human touch can smooth out small issues in the way the AI presents the data, ensuring accuracy and keeping the writing from feeling AI-generated.

If all is done well, paperwork creation that once would have taken weeks can instead take days, enabling teams to focus on strategic and technical planning.

Competitive and regulatory intelligence

The most common questions founders ask are:

• “Who else is in this space?”
• “What certifications do we need?”

AI can now identify competitors and their positioning, summarize compliance paths (such as FDA, CE, ISO and HIPAA) and help ensure accuracy.

Related: Who’s Your Biggest Threat? These 4 Questions Hold the Answer — and It’s Not Who You Think

Why this shift matters

Teams often operate within the bubble of immediate experience, because people tend to rely on what they already know. This leaves teams unaware of how much relevant information remains untapped. AI expands your team’s knowledge by providing far more information within a framework that is easy to use and understand. Real-time data, competitive insights and regulatory frameworks are now rendered in comprehensive yet understandable language, resulting in faster GTM timelines, clearer investment positioning and smarter, more informed decisions.

So, picture this: You may be at the threshold of a bunch of tough hurdles. But with AI, you can sprint faster and jump higher. It won’t run the race for you — but it will help you win.