Demystifying GenAI: Part 5
“Generative AI is like giving every worker a personal assistant on steroids. It can anticipate their needs, generate helpful suggestions, and streamline their workflow, making them super-efficient.” – Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author.
Welcome to the age of Augmented Productivity… Among its many benefits, GenAI’s ability to amplify workforce productivity is likely its most profound. Like personal computers, the Internet, and SmartPhones, GenAI is breaking down barriers to knowledge and amplifying the impact our teams can have on a daily basis.
GenAI makes team members ‘smarter’
With platforms like ChatGPT and Google Bard, team members can quickly access facts, resources and synthesized analysis across your company and around the world. GenAI is also being used to capture best practices across your organization and share them, in context, with other team members so that we can all learn from each other’s innovations. Finally, companies are beginning to leverage GenAI to develop curated talent development plans, based on a team member’s specific development needs, current skills, and defined interests.
Generative AI helps team members deliver ‘better’
GenAI-enabled platforms are providing ‘co-pilot like’ functionality that offers real-time feedback and recommendations to workers as they complete their core responsibilities. It can also provide a ‘jump start’ for creative tasks, framing out clear structure while leaving space for team members to dial-in the specific message, tone and personality. Not only do these solutions increase quality, but they also drive increased consistency and collaboration across team members
GenAI helps team members deliver ‘faster’
As the saying goes, ‘Time is Money’… GenAI enables team members to identify and access exactly the information they’re looking for, synthesized across multiple sources, at the click of a button. Think of the implications in a customer support context, where average issue resolution times can be reduced by 50% or more in many cases. Natural language-enabled automation of common and recurring tasks also frees up workers to focus on higher valued-added and strategic activities. Finally, GenAI enables accelerated ideation, prototyping and validation of new concepts and product ideas – helping organizations maximize the impact of their innovation efforts and further accelerating the pace of business.
What We’re Seeing in Practice:
- 2024 is the year of GenAI-enabled Productivity: Whether it’s personalized marketing campaigns, streamlined financial analysis, or Microsoft Copilot-enabled application development, GenAI is going to deliver productivity tailwinds in 2024.
- Start with Commercially-available solutions…: There are a ton of commercially available solutions available now to explore, customize and adopt. Your best bet for some ‘Quick Wins’ is to get started with 3rd party solutions to bring these capabilities to life while you experiment with custom solutions purpose built for your business.
- You may need to rethink security in some important ways: Many of these solutions will require new and evolved approaches to security and controls. As an example, data that is accessed through an LLM for custom responses won’t have the benefit of traditional application-level identity and access management. These and other challenges like prompt-injections and model controls will need to be rigorously solved for.
- You’ll need to ‘Feed the Beast’: Many of these solutions will require you to take a fresh look at your enterprise data and address issues that often aren’t obvious when interacting with specific applications. While not a ‘showstopper’, you should plan to assess your data needs overall maturity early in your GenAI adoption journey.
- Change Management and Adoption Support will be critical: We can’t overstate the importance of clear communications, change management and adoption support for companies looking to benefit from GenAI capabilities. Most organizations that are taking a ‘tech first’ approach to GenAI, and expecting their workforce to ‘figure it out’ are struggling to scale adoption. GenAI may seem like magic, but integrating it successfully into your company’s culture, priorities and practices will take focused, intentional work.
“The true magic of generative AI lies in its ability to augment human capabilities, not replace them. It can make us more productive, efficient, and ultimately, more fulfilled in our work.” – Joanna Bryson, AI researcher and ethicist.
There’s no escaping the fact that GenAI is going to drive broad-based changes in the way knowledge workers explore new ideas, collaborate, and deliver value. While many of the changes may be unsettling and uncomfortable for some, they’ll ultimately amplify the value we’re capable of delivering, with compelling benefits for those that successfully embed GenAI into their shared ways of working.
Stay tuned for the next 3 blogs in the ‘Demystifying GenAI’ series:
- Understanding what GenAI is Good At, and What it’s Not (Yet)…
- GenAI in 2024, Copilot, Not Auto-Pilot
- Adopting GenAI Securely & Responsibly
To learn more about Accelerated Innovation’s end-to-end GenAI enablement services, or specific topics of interest, please contact us to set up a call and start your GenAI journey.
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