Realising Generative AI’s Business Potential
We were delighted to recently host the third The IN Group Executive Exchange roundtable in London. A peer-to-peer group of c-suite business and technology leaders, brought together to share and discuss key tech topics. Bringing expertise and experience from industries including; telecoms, music licensing, central government, finance and more, the topic of this exchange was how business could realise the potential of generative AI.
Did our group view generative AI in the way that ChatGPT views itself ‘cutting-edge technology, capable of creating new content, simulating scenarios, and driving decision making processes’, or did they see the challenges of governance, abuse and bias outweighing the possible benefits? And, what practical steps they taken in the adoption of Gen AI?
Hosted by Justin Tan founder of Evolutio Consulting alongside AI specialist Debjani Roy, our guests shared how they are currently using AI within their own businesses, the benefits they are seeing and the pitfalls and areas for caution.
Generative AI Friend or Foe?
Kickstarting the session, Justin quickly identified that when assessing AI the leaders in attendance fell into two main camps – those who are already embracing generative AI and seeing benefits and those who are proceeding more carefully due to associated risks or are unsure how to proceed. Common themes were workforce impact because of automation, the risks of the erosion of value in creative industries or that the opportunity is so overwhelming, people don’t know where to start.
Where it is being embraced, the benefits of increased efficiency and time saving on manual tasks are being reaped. Examples within the group ranged from efficiency measures such as using AI to analyse documents, spreadsheets and research papers, increased marketing automation and hyper-personalisation and at the other end of the scale, the use of generative AI to transform the entire customer service experience of a business (which, contrary to popular belief was driving increased customer satisfaction).
There were multiple examples of where generative AI is being utilised, yet even the most ardent advocates had words of caution.
Inherent bias – generative AI may be able to quickly analyse a lot of data. But, where it is open to interpretation, whose interpretation is being used when most AI tools have been developed by a very narrow demographic?
The proliferation of tools that employees are using and the risks surrounding the misuse of data without the governance frameworks yet in place to ensure business interests are best served.
The problem of group think - if everyone is using the same AI, where does the really original thinking come from?
What was clear from the discussion across the group was that for many organisations, there are pockets of use cases rather than wholesale adoption. While this patchwork adoption of technology isn’t unusual, what makes AI perhaps unique is the pace of development. There is no space to spend the next couple of years planning how to effectively implement generative AI within your business – it is already here and in six months it will be different again.
Human or AI?
Using a quiz which showed images that were either generated by humans or AI, Justin demonstrated the dilemma around harnessing the power of a technology that is able to produce work that is indistinguishable from that created by humans. Very few people were able to guess 100% of the images correctly, underlining the point that even though we are only in the foothills of what generative AI is capable of, its impact is already considerable. This raises challenges around origination of creative work, copyright and how human creative talents may be replicated.
In areas such as music and image rights there are already copyright issues, for example, the current case involving Getty images’ site Getty Images lawsuit says Stability AI misused photos to train AI | Reuters. The law around this is evolving and will be increasingly tested. Google and Microsoft have announced copywrite protection promising that if you get sued they’ll take the burden of costs. As every copyright law is different there was a certain amount of scepticism about how much that would be enforceable and what real level of protection it offers, but it does show how some of the main players within AI are looking to address the barriers to use.
With AI capabilities growing exponentially, there are real concerns around the detection of what is AI generated. AI detectors are increasingly obsolete because they can’t keep pace with the AI models. This has consequences for things like education where we may need to move to new ways of learning and testing.
From use case to strategic imperative
In the final part of the session, the group shared use cases that illustrated examples of how organisations are utilising generative AI across areas such as:
Content creation
Customer engagement
Organisational intelligence / knowledge management
Workflow augmentation
Synthetic data
R&D
Those present shared examples and insights of real, rather than theoretical, uses, which was the welcome aim of the session in the current environment of hype and conceptual ideas. Ranging from highly creative AI human collaboration to create brand advertising, to the organisation of thousands of internal documents to support productivity, using simulated data to detect fraud and generative AI to speed up new drug creation, what these examples demonstrated was the multi-faceted capabilities of generative AI that are only starting to be realised.
Concluding the discussion, Justin outlined some of the key implications, including; the possibility of hyper-personalisation in marketing, the productisation of services such as data analysis, the disruption of existing business models, human-AI partnerships becoming the norm in many jobs and the huge challenge of workforce transition as Generative AI touches all areas of a business. The challenges businesses, and arguably wider society, face is how to adapt to these strategic opportunities and threats.
Some takeaways and considerations post-event
Are organisations ready to embrace these challenges and turn use cases into business defining ways of working?
We are seeing some increasingly impactful uses, for example, the reduction in time to market for a new life saving drug has huge potential for competitive advantage, but for how long? Over time, it will create a fundamental shift in the whole life sciences industry as the perceived norms about drug life cycles are ripped up. What is competitive advantage now, will become the new paradigm.
Adapt or die has never been so relevant and the choice about whether to embrace generative AI may already be out of our hands. The future is certainly going to be interesting and, as one of our guests pointed out, the technology isn’t going away, so ignoring it isn’t an option, however uncomfortable that may be.
Thank you to our hosts and all our guests for your openness to discuss what you did know and more importantly your willingness to admit what you didn’t. Our Executive Exchange events are only as good as the quality of discussion and we all thoroughly enjoyed a dive into the possibilities of Generative AI.
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If you’d like to find out more about the Executive Exchange and upcoming events get in touch with Natalie Whittlesey at Natalie.Whittlesey@wearetig.com and sign up for our InX Connect newsletter.