Today,
the GenAI frenzy has seemingly calmed — at least marginally. Many
companies are still facing the same questions they were a year ago: How
can they take advantage of the promised cost savings and substantial
efficiency gains that GenAI allegedly offers? How do they actually go
about putting it into business use?
From our front-seat rows in helping companies to adopt and use AI, we see many struggling. There are a few reasons for this.
First,
many businesses, large and small, are still grappling with how to
integrate traditional AI — such as rule-based algorithm and machine
learning — into their operations. At best, they are in an exploratory
phase with traditional AL, and at worst they’re simply feeling lost. A
recent
study
suggested that more than 70% of the large companies surveyed were still
wondering how to reap the potential benefits that AI can offer.
Second,
GenAI is far more complex and is geared to serve specific purposes.
While it is able to write a 5,000-word report in no time, it cannot, for
example, do a basic data entry task, like extracting and classifying
driver’s license data, that traditional AI can do easily. As such,
companies need to think deep and hard about which business cases might
be appropriate to find the benefits of GenAI. Navigating through
traditional AI is like steaming through choppy waters with a
state-of-the-art but somewhat cumbersome vessel, and GenAI adds more
tonnage, power, and an even more turbulent sea. A company still unsteady
with the former will of course struggle with the latter.
Third,
the longer-term implications of adopting GenAI — such as the long-term
costs and the impacts of current and future regulation — are still
uncertain. To us, the current situation throws us back to just before
the millennium. While companies back then may have seen the need for
setting up websites, few could clearly see the specific roles that the
wider internet would play as an integral part of omnichannel strategies,
let alone across devices and as phone apps.
Given
all this, it makes sense that most companies are still searching for a
path forward (even if it can feel like everyone else has it figured
out). That doesn’t mean the search is folly. Here’s how companies can
get their bearings and figure out what to do next.
The Market for GenAI
The first decision most companies have to make is
which
GenAI product they want to use. Right now, there are now a lot of GenAI
suppliers — both industry titans such as Meta and Alphabet and
newcomers like Hugging Face, Anthropic, and Stability.ai. This market is
set to become even more crowded, with data-rich corporations such as
Bloomberg and JPMorgan Chase
signaling their intention to enter the fray, and an Apple working on its own offering, called Ajax. There are a few factors companies should consider.
For
one, Open AI and its current rivals are now vying to be solution
developers’ top choice of GenAI, and the latecomers may have already
missed the boat. OpenAI’s
recent introduction
of a simple tool for creating ChatGPT-powered apps is likely an attempt
to consolidate its position, as users who are accustomed to one system
are likely to use it again in future endeavors. With the largest — and
arguably the best — GenAI in the market, OpenAI is in the best position
to establish an ecosystem.
That
said, solution developers will likely not want to swear allegiance to
any of the GenAI makers as to retain the option of being able to select
GenAI for different projects. This in turn has given rise to toolkits
such as LangChain, an open-source platform designed to enable users to
work across different GenAI at the same time.
The
competition at play between different GenAI companies somewhat
resembles the early days of the duel between iOS and Android. A large
ecosystem would enable OpenAI to remain the (money-making) market leader
for a few years until the its rivals are able to join force. This does
not necessarily mean that Apple and Google would unite to compete with
Microsoft. More likely, we would see rivals agreeing on the same
standard to collaborate on in order to stand against OpenAI’s dominance.
We believe this is not dissimilar to the situation in 2015 in which
Android’s supporters were finally able to establish a meaningful
ecosystem to rival iOS. As the GenAI market consolidates, we can expect
to see two to three large factions competing among themselves. Expect
more companies, big tech and startup alike, to redouble their efforts to
be at the heart of these systems.
Key Considerations to Take Advantage of GenAI
Given this current state of affairs, how could businesses onboard GenAI? Here, we would like to offer a few suggestions:
Choose performance over novelty.
In
our long experience working with GenAI, its performance doesn’t stem
from human-like text responses in a conversational manner or a model
that is trained on a vast amount of data. To get the best out of GenAI,
you must ask whether it’s the right technology for a particular task or
goal.
For
instance, while ChatGPT is (for the moment) better at handing words and
languages, we have found that traditional deep-learning models deliver
much better results at processing images. Another discovery: In one
product we are building, we found that ChatGPT-4 is better at
“understanding” users’ queries, while version 3.5 is faster and better
at converting processed output into responses to users.
In
other words, instead of unquestioningly embracing the latest AI
technology, companies must understand the business problems that they
are trying to solve and find the most suitable AI tool based on both the
strengths and weaknesses of each of available options.
Combine GenAI with the power of vector database.
This
is a new form of database that specializes in retrieving the closest
matching records to best answer specific queries (as opposed to
traditional databases that merely hold the records). Companies can use
an GenAI such as ChatGPT to break down users’ queries, and then use a
vector database to look for the best answers that match those
parameters.
Consider
an analogy: If you were interviewing for a job, ChatGPT and its
competitors would offer the ability to “read the room,” analyzing the
interviewers’ posture, facial expressions, word choices, and tones.
Vector databases, on the other hand, would act like your memory and
wisdom banks, constituting the capability to come up with the best
things to say.
Put
differently, GenAI by itself may not be sufficient. Depending on the
problems to be tackled, it can only be half of the technology solution.
The need for vector database to make GenAI truly useful means companies
should expect to face even more complexity and long lead time when
putting the solution together.
Never forget human-in-the-loop.
As
ever, no matter how powerful AI technologies seem to be, their
abilities are only as good as how much humans are involved. This is no
different for GenAI. Humans play a critical role in guiding GenAI toward
business goals, managing interactions within IT systems, designing the
actions required for data going to and coming out of AI models as well
as mitigating hallucinations — the made-up or outright false information
produced by GenAI — that remains a major problem of GenAI today.
Trace your data.
While
the problem of hallucinations remains rampant, it’s important to
establish a clear trail from data source all the way to end-users.
Traceability enables users to know the original source of data, which
bolsters reliability and trustworthiness of the GenAI output, thereby
creating a stronger foundation for informed decision-making.
Companies
need to ensure that data lineage is a prominent feature in both their
technology stacks as well as processes and workflows. Only in this way
companies can be in full knowledge that they are using the right kind of
data.
Have realistic expectations.
GenAI
is a fast-traveling ship with a lot happening below deck. It is hard to
know exactly what, how much, and how quick GenAI companies can
realistically achieve. Believing with conviction that it can yield
immediate results and outstanding financial returns will most likely
lead to disappointments. Leaders must recognize that the exploratory and
experimental journey of GenAI will likely be a long one.
The
utilization of GenAI technologies in business operations transcends a
mere technological investment; it’s fundamentally a business imperative.
Hard as it is as an undertaking, to onboard GenAI in company operations
is to understand the nuances of the current GenAI developments and have
a keen awareness of the challenges presented. Yet, for those businesses
that can successfully make use of GenAI to reach their business goals,
the rewards can only be both promising and huge.
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