Demystifying GenAI: Part 1
“Businesses that successfully harness AI will be the ones to shape the future, while those that don’t will struggle to keep up.”
– Fei-Fei Li (Co-Director of Stanford’s Human Centered AI Institute)
Leaders everywhere are hearing about how Generative AI is transforming the world of business. Most, though, have their hands full delivering on their current strategy and a long list of commitments. It’s critical, then, to ‘cut through the hype’, rapidly understand foundational GenAI capabilities, and assess their likely implications to your business.
Separating the Signal from the Noise…
There is an endless cycle of hype in the business world about the ‘next great innovation’, with media sources, consultants and vendors all incentivized to generate demand for their offerings. While it can be tempting to ignore the constant buzz, the reason it’s so pervasive is that now and again a strategic inflection point comes along with the potential to disrupt industries, establish new leaders, and punish those slow to respond. Like the migration to web-based commerce and the advent of SmartPhones, GenerativeAI represents a strategic inflection point that can significantly accelerate performance for early adopters and fast followers, or create existential headwinds for those slow to respond.
Understanding GenAI’s Core Proposition
The reason for all the excitement? GenAI has the ability to:
-
- Accelerate your top-line growth
-
- Drive transformational operating margin improvements
-
- Deliver significantly improved customer experiences
-
- ‘Supercharge’ workforce productivity
-
- Help you consistently outperform your competition
Assessing its Likely Impact on Your Industry & Business
‘Ubiquitous innovation’ is extremely rare – think the advent of electricity, automobiles, personal computing, the internet… These innovations created new business models, drove huge leaps in productivity, and created many of the most valuable companies in the world. GenAI is going to have a similar impact as companies embed its capabilities into their products, deliver personalized and interactive customer experiences, and engage and enable their workforce. The specific implementations may vary by industry and business, but they will be broad-based and strategically significant.
Gauging its Pace
GenAI’s momentum is potentially its most striking attribute. With >100MM users in its first 90 days, ChatGPT adoption rates exceeded anything we’ve ever seen. That momentum is accelerating, with tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce all aggressively bringing GenAI-enabled solutions to market. The pace is further augmented by 1,000’s of nimble smaller organizations producing pure-play GenAI solutions. The bottom-line: GenAI is moving fast, and only accelerating…
Evaluating Your Options
As you work to assess GenAI’s potential importance for your business, you’ll need to quickly develop a clear point of view on its strategic relevance and implications for existing roadmaps. While GenAI’s potential is clear and compelling, successful adoption will require focus, commitment, and institutional capacity, with trade-offs likely required across other strategic priorities.
What We’re Seeing in Practice
-
- ‘Why the Face?’: Many leaders feel a bit ‘blindsided’ by the pace and urgency of GenAI’s arrival on the scene.
-
- ‘Pulled in a Million Different Directions’: While many leaders suspect ‘there’s something to all the AI buzz, they’re struggling to carve out enough time and mindshare to form a coherent perspective on it.
-
- A Need for Leadership Team Alignment: Given its strategic importance and likely implications to future roadmaps, leadership teams need to get and stay tightly aligned on the path forward with GenAI.
-
- Growing Investment: Companies are ‘leaning in to’ GenAI in 2024, with material funding being prioritized to explore and scale GenAI adoption.
-
- Significant GenAI Talent & Capability Gaps: If you thought it was difficult to recruit Data Scientists to your business, just wait to try to recruit AI Engineers in 2024… Virtually every organization has significant gaps in GenAI expertise and capabilities, and will need to prioritize rapidly closing both.
Taking Action…
To ‘Win with Generative AI’, you’ll need to take decisive action to understand its capabilities, develop an integrated GenAI strategy, and mobilize your organization around an actionable roadmap.
This is the first of an integrated blog series from the Accelerated Innovation team entitled ‘Demystifying GenAI’, and is intended to serve as a straightforward, no-jargon resource for leaders looking to leverage GenAI to drive higher-performance across their business. Please click below to explore the next 3 blogs in the series.
To learn more about Accelerated Innovation’s end-to-end GenAI enablement services, or specific topics of interest, please get in touch to schedule a call and learn more about how we can help.
Follow us on LinkedIn to get alerts as our blog series are updated.
