Your synthetic teammate: Enriching new product development with generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming business activities, and new product development (NPD) is no exception. Despite the technology’s increasing importance and use in NPD, managers lack concrete guidance on how best to integrate it into their activities. We adopt a synthetic teammate framing that allows managers to approach GenAI in their NPD in a strategic and structured way, such that GenAI becomes a valuable yet heavily managed team member. To help promote the effective integration of this new synthetic teammate, we provide guidance on how GenAI can best be integrated across four key NPD activities, including how to communicate with it in the most effective way. Core to our guidance is ensuring that managers recognize the strengths and weaknesses of GenAI and agree to a human-first approach in their use of the technology. Humans need to remain in the lead on NPD, with GenAI as a synthetic teammate enriching its activities to give companies a competitive edge.