GenAI - Chill out and panic at the same time?

As I was about to share an insightful article I read on GenAI, I thought of penning some of my thoughts on paper as well. Of course, my first instinct was - will this be relevant in a few weeks :-) The pace in AI and specifically GenAI advancement is almost time warping. But like any other technology innovation, one has to ground the potential in business reality - what a company needs to do with this new capability to get an advantage to add more value to its consumers, where and when to invest, where to start, planning horizon (chill or panic?), etc.

AI has surely transcended the ability to just crunch numbers and show possible outcomes. Many companies are busy generating insights into the fabric of their business decision making. And just like Internet disruption created companies like Facebook, Alibaba, Amazon, etc. AI will usher in new ones. And AI will be just there – we will use it and we’ll have it everywhere. For e.g. no one says today we use Internet. It’s a given.

But with recent developments, AI is seeking to mimic the human brain. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an area where AI is not constrained only by supervised learning but exploring new patterns altogether. This new inflection point is due to the convergence of 3 things: natural language processing, large amounts of training data with advanced transformer models, and huge compute power. This has started to create the beginnings of human-like cognition. Here “Intelligence” implies thinking, act, judging - an inorganic thing doing what humans do. And just like human cognition follows these steps: we sense, we decide, we create, we learn, and we remember the past (mostly that is :-)).

The current applicable use cases are mostly in worker productivity and enhancing customer experience:

1.      Employee Experience (EX): For e.g. when someone has to start a new proposal, tax filing, insurance claim, etc. they start from a document from a knowledge repository like SharePoint, etc. so as to not reinvent the wheel. This technology once trained with the right data can do that at scale. As someone said it right, "Think of GenAI as an inorganic cognitive augment for humans – another worker”. I talk to so many executives that start their day these days with asking questions like “I’m meeting XYZ today from a public company, ABC. What are the top 3 things on his/her mind?”

2.      Customer Experience (CX): GenAI is about generating NEW EXPERIENCES in an autonomous way. For e.g. If you have a complex product portfolio and your consumers are asking about these constantly, a GenAI Product Concierge can provide personalized recommendations, answer queries, and assist customers in making informed purchasing decisions, typically leading to 30-35% cost reduction and enhanced CX.

So then people ask the ‘adoption’ question – can this can run on its own or will a human loop always be needed? The answer will depend on what this is used for. One important human skill that will always be needed - deduction and inference - “asking the right questions” a.k.a. the Socratic Method. As your prompts and focus get better, you can leverage more value.

And the ultimate question people debate upon – is this technology good or bad? Are you a techno optimist or pessimist?? Well, since humans moved from pen & paper to calculators to computers, this debate and fear has existed. But the world we live in has evolved and the current AI-Native generation is surrounded by smart phones and assistants (like Siri and Alexa), spam filters on email, recommendations from Spotify and Netflix, etc. So the role of all stakeholders in society will be to make people fluent in AI technology, ethics, applications, and implications – a responsibility not only for business, but for society at large (Responsible AI).

#AI #ResponsibleAI #GenAI