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Business value of Generative AI

Adnan Masood, Ph.D. Chief AI Architect, UST

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When Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of cloud file storage company Box, first tried ChatGPT, he immediately cleared his calendar. He asked employees to do the same to truly appreciate the ground-moving nature of the first major mainstream Generative AI solution. He told The New York Times that he immediately began thinking about how his business could incorporate this to grow or protect his existing business. Reactions as Levie's proliferated through Silicon Valley and beyond, to every company worried about how new technologies could upend their businesses. As Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, sagely told the Times: “There’s a lot of value to be won or lost.” Missteps aside - and there have been plenty in the first few months of ChatGPT’s public beta, there is no denying that ChatGPT and the Generative AI it represents will transform business as we know it. With the launch of ChatGPT-4, businesses will have no way to avoid the transformative power of artificial intelligence.

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How enterprises are already reaping the benefits of Generative AI

The major search engines, Bing and Google, have already demonstrated the viability of ChatGPT by incorporating it into their search engines. Google just announced its Workspace tools like Google Docs and Sheets, as well as Gmail, will all get an AI boost shortly. Project and task management apps like Notion have also included AI in their products. Salesforce announced ChatGPT would soon be available for Slack. Every day, a new company announces how their new offerings feature Generative AI. Soon, AI will infiltrate virtually every enterprise application.

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Implementing Generative AI in enterprise

In our first blog, we discussed the various players driving Generative AI forward. It's a mix of academia, startups, and internal investments by large enterprises. And while the latter two will look to create direct-to-consumer products, the reality is every business will have a use case for incorporating AI into their operations. And there will be a huge market for AI companies to white label their solutions to be incorporated by companies that did not or could not get into the AI arms race fast enough. And we’re extremely early in the process. But make no mistake; AI will transform businesses across all industries in several ways. Organizations must understand more about the business use cases of this emerging technology and start to plan for what they need to do to bring it into their solutions.

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How enterprises can use Generative AI to power their businesses

1) Supercharging customer service and support: This is a perfect example of how AI should be considered an extension of human knowledge and work. Many times, customers have simple questions to which they want immediate answers. For years, simple chatbots have done a good job of providing answers based on a static decision tree. AI will take this to another level, enabling the chatbots to understand trickier questions better (or those written in an odd syntax), be able to dig into deeper reservoirs of information to produce more meaningful results, and give more personalized answers. That progress only heightens the importance of human labor; engineers will need to work on the algorithm to eliminate bias and code specifics about the company culture or perspective they want to shine through in customer interactions. They'll also need to be on hand for conversations that require a human. But ultimately, AI-driven chatbots will free them up to do more proactive work with customers, especially those whose patronage is most important to their company’s financial health. UST has already built several Generative-AI chatbots for clients intending to reduce customer support costs while improving the quality of service.

2) Unearthing terabytes of business intelligence: As companies became digital over the past few decades, the amount of data they created has exponentially grown. Estimates put it at 3.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Yet much of it is still unstructured and inaccessible for the purposes of business intelligence. In short, companies are sitting on data they can’t analyze. Generative AI can cut through all of that by parsing unstructured data, finding patterns, surfacing insights, and making ad hoc queries easier.

3) Expediting development projects: Generative AI is one of the most important developments to happen to the low code/no code development movement. People have started to ask ChatGPT to code things for them; one such example was a video game (that was, unfortunately, copying an already existing game). The low code/no code movement already had steam before ChatGPT. Now it’s hard to see a world where a majority of coding doesn’t happen by people (both engineers and laypersons) asking Generative AI to write code.

4) Sales and marketing support: Generative AI can take concepts your sales and marketing team have created and spin them into countless iterations. But it’s not without challenges. Generative AI has been trained on terabytes of content, so it tends to plagiarize existing ideas. And there’s still a debate on what rights those content creators hold. So companies should be very wary of entrusting their sales and marketing to Generative AI. But it is a brilliant extension of human ingenuity to build out endless permutations of the original idea created by your employees or agencies.

5) Scenario planning: History features many examples of companies either eschewing new market opportunities because of uncertainty or launching into disastrous decisions because the reasoning was flawed or the data was misinterpreted. While Generative AI is not omnipotent and cannot predict the future, it can run scenarios on potential outcomes from a major business decision. Should Company X enter the Asia market? Should Company Y go from a service-based approach to a more solutions-oriented offering? These are just two of the thousands of questions companies must contemplate daily to push their businesses forward and either grow or defend their existing sales channel. Generative AI can help companies understand the ramifications of their decisions before actually taking action, saving money and effort and, potentially, the viability of their businesses.

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The future of Generative AI in enterprise

Generative AI will transform businesses, create winners and losers, and remake industries. The time to start understanding how it will impact your business is now. Getting it right will require a mix of speed and precision. Leading companies are wisely working with external partners that have completed similar projects and are already well-versed in the intricacies of Generative AI. UST has significant experience helping clients start Generative AI projects using ChatGPT, GPT3.5/4, and several other Generative and discriminative models. Our team of experts works with our clients hand-in-hand to ideate and execute projects that will transform their businesses. Contact us today to schedule a consultation so you can begin your company's journey to mastering Generative AI.