From Intuition to Insight: Leveraging AI to Forecast New Product Success

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds transformative potential for decision-making in new product development (NPD), yet firms remain hesitant to entrust investment Go/No-Go project decisions entirely to AI. This article explores how AI can address critical challenges in NPD, particularly by predicting product success using data-driven models. The author introduces AI-PRISM, an innovative seven-factor scorecard model powered by AI, designed to systematically assess NPD projects, fill information gaps, and provide unbiased success probabilities. AI-PRISM leverages external data sources and rigorous analysis to overcome the limitations of traditional methods, such as human biases and incomplete data. Validation tests demonstrate its reliability and accuracy, outperforming human evaluators in consistency. By integrating success probabilities into financial metrics like Expected Commercial Value (ECV), AI-PRISM enhances the accuracy of Go/No-Go decisions, potentially doubling productivity in RD&E