What's your strategic response going to be?
The age of AI is here whether we like it or not. A recent MIT study has shown that businesses can achieve a 50% increase in productivity by leveraging generative AI.
New AI applications, such as ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Jasper, are now capable of performing tasks once considered to be exclusive to humans. These tasks include writing blog posts, designing, writing computer code, and even contributing to the creation of video games and movies.
While they are hardly perfect, often delivering responses that are at best inconsistent, at worst downright wrong, we know how rapidly technology can improve. Generative AI products are improving exponentially as they feed on the firehose of recorded knowledge.
Using AI tools (and that's what they are, tools) to create ad campaigns can save time and money, but also introduces new risks for clients from plagiarism to copyright.
So what's your strategic response going to be?
A McKinsey report takes a first look at where business value could accrue and the potential impacts on the workforce.
"McKinsey estimates that generative AI could increase the productivity of the marketing function with a value between 5 and 15 percent of total marketing spending".
An interesting perspective on why human imagination is key to winning the AI revolution.
"If widespread use of AI eliminates existing sources of competitive advantage, where can companies look to create distance between themselves and their rivals?
The answer lies in understanding what AI cannot do: create entirely new things".
The Guardian newspaper published three broad principles setting out how they will and won’t use GenAI tools. It's worth noting.
"When we use genAI, we will focus on situations where it can improve the quality of our work, for example by helping journalists interrogate large data sets, assisting colleagues through corrections or suggestions, creating ideas for marketing campaigns, or reducing the bureaucracy of time-consuming business processes.
Any use of these tools will focus on what is valuable and worth protecting at the Guardian: “serious reporting that takes time and effort, carefully uncovers the facts, holds the powerful to account, and interrogates ideas and arguments”."
Understand the impact on your organisation
All industries will be impacted by generative AI, but not all will be impacted equally.
Take a hard look at your business and consider how you respond to the risks and opportunities it presents. You might need a far deeper re-architecting of the business versus just a re-skinning or a re-structuring to cut costs:
The three big questions are:
- What can be AI enhanced and what should not?
- How will the AI product be built/trained and what quality control will ensure that the result is safe and legal among other things?
- How will the organisational design and talent allocation change to incorporate these new capabilities.
For most companies there is a good chance that AI technology itself will become a commodity-like ingredient?
In fact, smaller companies (outside of the mega cap tech companies that are funding and driving AI investments) are likely to benefit more from AI since it will now make amazing capabilities affordable to everybody.
It doesn’t have to work against us, if we choose to work with it.
Let's define your strategic response together. Get in touch to learn more.
