How to leverage generative AI to unlock value and reinvent your business
Summary
- Generative AI has captured the attention of executives but many have yet to fully grasp how it will change business — and how quickly that can happen.
- Companies will use both GenAI platforms and embedded GenAI capabilities in enterprise apps to change how their business operates.
- Using GenAI to create new content or automate tasks only scratches the surface of its transformational power to drive business outcomes.
- Key focus areas include functional and workforce transformation, responsible AI, cloud and data modernization and business model reinvention.
There’s no doubt that generative AI (GenAI) is shaking up the business world. And executives have plenty of questions: Will it disrupt my business? Are my employees already using it? How about competitors? What are the new risks and how do I manage them? Where do I start?
While those are valid questions with fairly straightforward answers, they may distract you from the real opportunity. A better starting point: How can GenAI accelerate outcomes now — and better position us to lead in a radically altered industry landscape?
While that may be a big ask, it is important not to underestimate GenAI’s potential. That’s because GenAI is a technology multiplier that demands big-picture thinking and action. On its own, it’s pretty remarkable, democratizing AI and giving non-techies a powerful way to speed up time-consuming tasks. But GenAI’s real advantage is that it’s a catalyst for transforming entire processes, functions and business models. That’s only possible, however, when you start thinking about how GenAI can securely tap into your company’s unique data and intellectual property and connect to your business foundations and broader ecosystems.
It also demands that every executive pay attention, even if you don’t think GenAI is relevant to your business right now. Whatever your priority, it’s likely GenAI has a role to play and can help accelerate or enhance digital transformation. Bolstering cybersecurity, for example, is at the top of many corporate agendas. New GenAI-based solutions can help quickly pinpoint threats by synthesizing data from your cyber tools. Then GenAI can help speed remediation by enabling your security team to “ask” for details and receive specific guidance through a chat interface. Or consider ERP data modernization, in which companies replace data silos and legacy systems with a cloud-native environment that enables them to leverage their data across the business. GenAI can help automate some of the migration processes, and it can help drive the value and utility you get from having all your data in one place. This can then provide a way for all enterprise users (not just data specialists) to access and interrogate that data under appropriate business controls.
GenAI is also becoming embedded in the enterprise apps your company uses in the front and back office, so expect it to change how your people get their day-to-day work done.
Rethinking everything
Given GenAI’s broad reach, it’s a matter of reimagining how you get things done — from how employees do their jobs and how customers engage with your business to what you sell and how you compete. In the past, that might have required a multi-year, multi-million dollar transformation project. Today, thanks to GenAI and cloud, it can be done much more quickly and economically. But succeeding requires your full executive team and a truly holistic approach.
Consider the case of a financial services company that wanted to use GenAI to automate and improve job posting and employee onboarding as part of an HR transformation. Initial conversations with the CHRO quickly expanded to include the CIO and CISO as they focused on a secure and responsible AI approach. When the team realized there were archetypes, or repeatable patterns, to many of the processes ripe for automation, there was a light bulb moment. They could not only scale these approaches to other functions and across the business, they could think even bigger. That’s what piqued the CEO and CFO’s interest: What does GenAI mean for our business model, and how can we leverage our IP in new ways to drive revenue?
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What generative AI means for your business
Here are key focus areas to consider as your company begins harnessing GenAI.
- Functional transformation: Reimagining operations. The “sweet spot” for deploying generative AI for rapid ROI is clear: Use it to automate and enhance operations, ranging from marketing and finance to supply chain and tax compliance. GenAI can enable you to do more with existing resources, make better decisions and improve the customer and employee experience. It can organize data and document sets to make human research easier, create first drafts of financial, risk and compliance reports, create personalized customer service responses or flag anomalies in human-written reports. Producing trusted results will require strong oversight based on a responsible AI framework.
- Responsible AI: Building trust and managing risk. The only way that GenAI can truly transform your business is if it can be trusted. That requires responsible AI, a methodology designed to enable AI’s trusted and ethical use. Through technologies, processes and upskilling, responsible AI addresses the risks — including cyber, privacy, legal, performance, bias and intellectual property risks — that generative AI can bring. The most effective way to implement responsible AI is trust-by-design, building it into your systems from Day One, then continually iterating as you learn what works for your business.
- Workforce: Building skills for a new way of working. AI can enable knowledge workers to do far more, and do it more quickly than they do today. But to do that, your people will need broad upskilling to make the most of new tools and ways of working. Don’t be fooled. GenAI’s remarkable ease of use can be misleading. It’s necessary to learn how to use it responsibly, how to identify use cases and how to help customize generative AI models. Your organization will also need new roles, such as prompt engineer and model mechanic for a potential “AI factory.”
- Cloud and data: Engineering the foundation for growth. GenAI lets you tap into your unstructured data — enabling you to use more of it for decision-making, revenue growth and new lines of business. It should be a key part of any company’s data and application modernization plans. GenAI also fundamentally changes how cloud-based business applications, including custom systems, are built and operate.
- New business models: Monetizing data and industry reinvention. What if you could automatically turn your unstructured data into valuable insights — or into new software code, products or services? Or if you could offer every customer a truly personalized experience? GenAI offers this potential, which could both create new business models and disrupt core value chains. As you take advantage of the operational efficiencies that GenAI offers right now, plan for how it might transform your industry and company in the near future.
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