AI Has Made Building 10x Faster. But Validation Is Still Stuck in the Past.

AI has changed the speed of product development in a way we’ve never seen before. What once took months can now take days, even hours. Code, design, copywriting, and data analysis. AI accelerates all of it.

But here’s the paradox: while building has become 10x faster, validating those products in the market has barely improved.

At UnLock, we see this firsthand. Our consultancy builds AI-powered solutions for clients, and through UnLock Labs, we incubate our own AI products. That dual perspective gives us a clear view of where AI is delivering, and where it’s falling short.

Take one of our projects, Curblift, an app that helps homeowners visualize home upgrades. Upload a photo of your home, and instantly visualize a new fence, yard, roof, paintjob or siding. We built it in a week - something that would have taken eight to ten weeks just a few years ago.

But here’s the catch: testing our core hypothesis, whether we could acquire homeowners cheaply enough to resell leads to contractors, still required the same slow, human-driven process - running campaigns, attracting real users, waiting for feedback.

Yes, AI helps on the margins. It speeds up campaign strategy, messaging, and data crunching. But the essential act of testing with real customers? That part is still stuck in the old world.

And that matters. Because if companies can build faster but not validate faster, the market gets flooded with unproven products. Resources get wasted. Customer trust erodes. The speed advantage disappears.

The next frontier isn’t just AI for building. It’s AI for validation; systems that can simulate customer behavior, pressure-test business models, and compress learning cycles as dramatically as AI has compressed building cycles.

In the AI era, the winners won’t just be the companies who build fastest. They’ll be the ones who validate fastest.