Generative AI (gen AI) was born on November 30, 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT and has since traveled at 160 miles per hour, attracting 100 million people and growing in numbers. Because gen AI is new and incredibly powerful, we can already see how companies will incorporate gen AI capabilities into their business strategies and operations. Our experience with two of his previous explosive technologies tells us how.
- BYO Explosion The late 2000s taught us how to incorporate employee-driven disruption. We learned it when employees brought their personal technology to solve customer and business problems. We have empowered, guided and protected our people and our company while harnessing the new value of personal technology in business.
- Mobile, Social and Original Internet Explosion It taught us how to respond to and capitalize on customer-driven disruption. We built a mobile app that helps our customers on mobile when they need it. Employed social media communication to improve engagement and collaboration. And we have the tools to make the most of the business models that the Internet has shaped.
Technology executives should prepare for generative AI to go both ways and enter the business full force through four doors:
- bottom up. Some of the 100 million people already using generative AI are working for you. As we learned in the BYOD era, employees will adopt any tool that makes them more successful. Excessive adoption of Gen AI will lead to widespread adoption of BYOAI. You can’t stop them completely. Your job is to put in place guardrails that protect corporate intellectual property and teach responsible AI skills. Your company’s IP is at risk and you need guardrails. As with his initial BYO onslaught, attention must be paid now to empower, guide and protect employees and companies. Power up your listening tools and network sniffers. Urgently review and promote responsible AI policies. Addressing BYOAI will shape a top-down approach to AI. Because employees are better equipped and ready for robotics.
- top down. Gen AI unlocks the value of 10+ years of investment in artificial intelligence including data, insights and machine learning models. This is where your investment in trustworthy AI pays off because trustworthy AI is ready to use. Already, hyperscalers and software-as-a-service platform providers have announced, and will continue to release, incremental next-generation AI-infused applications. Already, service providers and users are using his TuringBot for code generation and testing. We already incorporate marketing content generated from text prompts to hyper-personalize engagement. And soon it will be overhauling usability with text-based interfaces to business and analytical applications. Every department in the business will have ideas on how to use generative AI, mostly to optimize, automate, or augment something. Some will be great. Choose the easiest, safest, and most practical way to get started.
- Outside. Customer expectations of what gen AI can do for them are growing faster than anyone can keep up. Every day new applications emerge that use gen AI to do something useful. The last I saw was a “free” cover letter generator using GPT-4. (By “free,” I mean they’re accumulating your work preferences to resell as insights.) Microsoft sparked a search war with his OpenAI on Bing, while Google We are currently working in earnest with Bard. Already in the US, 35% of Gen Z and 25% of millennials use bots to purchase hard-to-find inventory. That bot’s habits are further enhanced by Gen AI, and the expectations are even higher. Your job begins by predicting where customer adoption will directly affect your company. It’s no good if your customers know more about the product landscape than your salespeople. If they’re getting Gen AI-powered customer care from your competitors instead of you, that’s not a good thing. If your competitor’s product is built into the next-generation recommendation engine and yours is not, it’s no good. As with mobile, the answer is to radically enhance generative AI capabilities for customers.
- inside out. As we navigate the bush of generative AI opportunities, we quickly identify ways to help our customers and deliver more value with their own generative AI-embedded applications. Customer care and frontline employee empowerment are expected early outcomes. But there will be opportunities to streamline customer onboarding, hyper-personalize engagement, provide better customer self-service, and spark new rounds of value creation like those sparked by mobile apps. Categorize scenarios based on data readiness, impact, and confidence in predicting and managing costs associated with Gen AI licensing and compute. While the technical architecture is still in flux, layers of intelligence (part user, part others, and part public) are built-in and protected by input and output control gates to drive next generation AI. We believe it will be connected to the injected application. This “layers, gates, pipes” approach helps you scale and leverage all your capabilities, giving you a clear picture of where your situation and costs lie.
This post was written by Vice President, Principal Analyst Ted Schadler and was first published here.
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