
The CEO’s Guide to the Generative AI Revolution
This powerful technology has the potential to disrupt nearly every industry, promising both competitive advantage and creative destruction. Here’s how to strategize for that future.
The new wave of generative AI systems, such as ChatGPT, have the potential to transform entire industries. To be an industry leader in five years, you need a clear and compelling generative AI strategy today.
We are entering a period of generational change in artificial intelligence. Until now, machines have never been able to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from humans. But new generative AI models are not only capable of carrying on sophisticated conversations with users; they also generate seemingly original content.
To gain a competitive edge, business leaders first need to understand what generative AI is.
Generative AI is a set of algorithms, capable of generating seemingly new, realistic content—such as text, images, or audio—from the training data. The most powerful generative AI algorithms are built on top of foundation models that are trained on a vast quantity of unlabeled data in a self-supervised way to identify underlying patterns for a wide range of tasks.
For example, GPT-3.5, a foundation model trained on large volumes of text, can be adapted for answering questions, text summarization, or sentiment analysis. DALL-E, a multimodal (text-to-image) foundation model, can be adapted to create images, expand images beyond their original size, or create variations of existing paintings.
These new types of generative AI have the potential to significantly accelerate AI adoption, even in organizations lacking deep AI or data-science expertise. While significant customization still requires expertise, adopting a generative model for a specific task can be accomplished with relatively low quantities of data or examples through APIs or by prompt engineering. The capabilities that generative AI supports can be summarized into three categories:
Today, some generative AI models have been trained on large of amounts of data found on the internet, including copyrighted materials. For this reason, responsible AI practices have become an organizational imperative.
Generative AI systems are democratizing AI capabilities that were previously inaccessible due to the lack of training data and computing power required to make them work in each organization’s context. The wider adoption of AI is a good thing, but it can become problematic when organizations don’t have appropriate governance structures in place.
Generative AI text models can be used to generate texts based on natural language instructions, including but not limited to:
This is just the beginning. As companies, employees, and customers become more familiar with applications based on AI technology, and as generative AI models become more capable and versatile, we will see a whole new level of applications emerge.
Generative AI has massive implications for business leaders—and many companies have already gone live with generative AI initiatives. In some cases, companies are developing custom generative AI model applications by fine-tuning them with proprietary data.
The benefits businesses can realize utilizing generative AI include:
With the right policies, use cases, and people strategy, CEOs can help their companies grasp the immense potential of generative AI. Explore the four-part video series with François Candelon.
As generative AI makes it easier for everyone to adopt AI at scale, companies will need to determine which uses cases offer true long-term competitive advantages. Watch the second chapter of François Candelon's video series.
With proper upskilling, reskilling, and recruiting, CEOs can develop a workforce capable of thriving in bionic organizations that embrace the value of generative AI. Watch the third chapter of François Candelon's video series.
By developing clear guidelines on the use of generative AI, companies can reap benefits, channel innovation, and mitigate risks. Watch the final chapter of François Candelon's video series.
Generative AI technology will cause a profound disruption to industries and may ultimately aid in solving some of the most complex problems facing the world today. Three industries have the highest potential for growth in the near term: consumer, finance, and health care.
Given that the pace the technology is advancing, business leaders in every industry should consider generative AI ready to be built into production systems within the next year—meaning the time to start internal innovation is right now. Companies that don’t embrace the disruptive power of generative AI will find themselves at an enormous—and potentially insurmountable—cost and innovation disadvantage.
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