If you’ve not heard of ChatGPT, it’s time to come out from the rock you’ve been living under! Without going into the details of the workings of ChatGPT, I think it is suffice to say that it represents a once in a generation capability that puts insane power in our hands – the ability to extract meaning from petabytes and exabytes of information at your prompt, and its power to generate content that is delivered as text, images, videos, and even executable application code and websites. It’s like the omnipresent, intelligent assistant that you’ve always wished for, call it Alfred, Jeeves, or Jarvis – and it’s now here at your fingertips!
While we are still at the early innings of an AI revolution, the recent availability of large language models (LLM’s) that are the foundation for ChatGPT, have cemented AI’s position as a top technology trend not just in 2023 but for many years to come. Overnight, 100s of startups have emerged thanks to developer APIs made available by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other leading AI software companies to open source generative AI models, and these startups are actively working to harness generative AI technologies for a variety of applications targeting consumers and businesses. However, as with any technology, AI also poses unique challenges, especially when it comes to governance and responsible use. In this thought leadership piece, we explore why AI is a top trend of 2023, the benefits it brings, and the challenges that need to be addressed.
Hyper-personalisation at scale
A key benefit of AI is its ability to amplify the impact of businesses by deriving hyper-detailed customer profiles at scale. With these dynamic customer profiles, businesses can gain insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and needs that they may not have been able to capture otherwise. Combined with generative AI technologies, this information can be used to hyper-personalise customer experiences across their journey, from prospecting, selling, servicing, and building loyalty, thereby enabling businesses to create stronger relationships with their customers and drive higher value interactions over a longer period of time.
Intelligent Process Automation
With AI-powered solutions, businesses can automate processes, generate insights, and make data-driven decisions faster than ever before. AI can help businesses scale their operations by enabling them to handle more data, more customers, and more complex problems. Combined with generative AI technologies, repetitive tasks can be readily automated. Any task that involves the process of review, analysis, summarization and report generation, especially in regulated industries such as healthcare, insurance, and financial services can be made drastically more efficient with generative AI. This implies lower costs, better productivity, and higher profit margins at levels never seen before.
The democratisation of AI
Most importantly, AI has rapidly democratised access to its capabilities, enabling businesses of all sizes and industries to leverage its benefits. With the availability of cloud-based low/no-code AI platforms, and open source generative AI models, businesses can access AI-powered solutions without the need for extensive infrastructure and technical expertise. This opens up new opportunities for innovation and growth for businesses that may not have had access to these capabilities before.
In conclusion, while the benefits of AI are clear and exciting, the technology also poses unique challenges, especially when it comes to its governance and responsible use. Without the appropriate governance, this technology can be used in catastrophic ways with the potential to impact human lives, disrupt the global financial systems, and even upend democracies. As businesses integrate AI into their operations to drive crucial decisions, they must ensure that they have the right governance frameworks in place to address issues related to bias, privacy, and transparency. Additionally, businesses must be transparent with their customers about how their data is being used and ensure that AI is being used in a responsible and ethical manner. To address these challenges, leading AI platforms have been developed to provide a low/no-code, collaborative environment for automating the development and control of trusted AI applications. AI ethics and responsibility in the age of generative AI technology such as ChatGPT takes on a very important role, one that cannot be taken lightly nor can it be solved by technology companies. This will require a collaboration across technology vendors, academia, regulators, and governments, coming together to establish the right policies, frameworks, and thresholds to govern and monitor its usage by industry, domain, and region.
