The Growing Impact of AI
Whether individual consumers are aware of it or not, AI is changing everything we do, in a host of different ways. This new technology has an impact on three levels – on the individual user, on organizations and how they operate, and lastly, on the market at large.
Though concerns have been expressed recently about the ethics of AI, and the breakneck pace of development, others are more bullishly confident about its future. As Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, put it, “It’s very clear that AI is going to impact every industry. I think that every nation needs to make sure that AI is a part of their national strategy. Every country will be impacted.”
Let’s look a little closer at how AI is affecting those three layers of commerce – the personal, corporate, and market-wide.
aI and the individual user
Productivity is the main driver behind an individual’s adoption of AI-powered tools, from Grammarly to Chat-GPT. Rather than replacing human creativity, the ideal is for AI to act as a virtual creative partner for human content creators, diagnosticians, designers, or economists.
A recent Korn Ferry survey revealed that 46% of workers were already using Chat-GPT at work. The pace of adoption of AI technologies makes it clear how popular and sought-after these generative AI tools are.
While it took 16 years for mobile phones to hit their first 100 million buyers, and seven years for internet usage to become that prevalent, Char-GPT took just two months, following launch to reach 100 million users.
What level of productivity gains can be achieved? McKinsey’s “Economic Potential of Generative AI” report found that “Generative AI could enable labor productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6 percent annually through 2040, depending on the rate of technology adoption and redeployment of worker time into other activities.”
Half a percentage point of increased productivity may seem minimal, but that could constitute a significant competitive advantage over less efficient rivals. McKinsey also found that using AI in combination with other technologies, including automation, could tip that productivity gain towards 3.3%, a much more enticing prospect.
AI and companies
Even if organizations are understandably hesitant to set AI loose on business sensitive information such as customer data, AI is already producing significant gains in SG&M expenses, particularly in the field of data analytics.
Whether it’s the chatbots that handle huge volumes of customer queries in record time, or diagnostic tools that speed up the process of radiography diagnoses in hospitals, routine tasks that depend upon pattern recognition (the language of a query, or the shape of a cancerous tumor) are perfect for AI.
Using such tools frees up human workers to handle more complex queries or provide the one thing AI can never offer adequately – human empathy. Meanwhile, AI can interpret and sort millions of data points, helping companies source valuable insights and form strategic responses.
Manufacturers are using AI to spot defects or flaws, while in recruitment, companies use AI to scan CVs at scale and derive personalized interview questions for each candidate. Software engineers are employing AI to convert JavaScript into Python code, and marketers are using AI-powered sentiment analysis to find out what customers really think of their products.
Automation is here to stay, and AI makes it more than a blind piece of software engineering. Indeed, AI’s impact is already being felt in major corporations.
AI automation Potential
A Martech study from March 2023 showed that 73% of marketers currently use GenAI tools, with 44% using it to compose email copy, 37% employing AI chatbots and 35% composing SEO content with it. Clearly, there’s no going back from adopting this invaluable new engine for industry.
The questions that remain worth asking include: how do we ringfence safe AI use, validate the insights it provides, and redeploy the displaced human workforce?
AI and Changing Markets
At the level of markets, AI is reshaping the value chain, while giving birth to entirely new services, sparking something of a goldrush in B2B AI tool innovation.
Take just one industry: finance. This is an arena in which 100% accuracy is required. This has made Fintech slow adopters of GenAI, which can only claim a 90% accuracy rating when creating content (at time of writing). AI’s tendency to “hallucinate” facts has been well-reported.
However, AI in partnership with human prompters, editors, and managers, can supply the 100% accuracy that Fintech demands. For an industry that could significantly benefit to achieve huge potential gains, the fallacy of out-of-control AIs running unchecked needs to be countered.
A recent article by Bain Capital Ventures, identified ten radically varied Fintech processes that could be revolutionized with GenAI, ranging from customized marketing to information validation, to risk identification. So many aspects of FinTech can be optimized and automated with GenAI that it has been predicted that almost two thirds of Americans will use mobile or online banking by 2025.
Redefining the genAI value chain
A new value chain has been created, built up from the LLMs and Foundation models, to the consulting services which use AI tools to provide services with a predictive power scarcely imagined ten years ago. Tenfold productivity gains have become more than a CEO’s fever dream.
There will be three components of GenAI products in future, of which the Large Language Models (LLMs) currently grabbing the headlines will be but a small part. Cutting edge GenAI will require:
- Foundation Models and LLMs, becoming ever more sophisticated.
- Fine-tuning services producing domain-specific training data, and reinforcement learning processes with human experts in the driving seat.
- New workflows, spearheaded by providers who will design a bespoke use case from the ground up to deliver exactly what each client needs from the modular components available.
That’s where Evalueserve comes in, helping businesses realize the massive gains that GenAI and automation can offer, if properly designed, integrated, and implemented.
JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon admitted in 2022 that “we already have more than 300 use cases in production today for risk, prospecting, marketing, and customer service.”
AI needn’t be anxiety inducing; it can be a powerhouse of industry and a value chain game-changer.
