McKinsey

In addition to generating and evaluating design candidates, there are several additional ways that LLMs, sometimes coupled with other AI technologies, are being used to accelerate various activities in the product development process:

Identifying and analyzing customer/user needs, products, and features. LLM-powered software solutions are being used, particularly by consumer companies, to synthesize a vast array of product reviews, social media posts, customer service transcripts, and other sources of customer data to identify addressable market segments and the product categories and features/functions that would best address the as-yet unmet needs of customers.

Exploring and synthesizing existing research and data. In industries such as life sciences, chemicals, and materials, there is a vast and rapidly growing body of published research and databases. It can be challenging for scientists to keep up with the literature in their own subdiscipline, not to mention the adjacent or even distant areas of other research, which could bring insights for breakthroughs in their field. Oftentimes, the volume of machine-readable data being made available is growing even more rapidly than published papers.