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Family businesses understand that doing what you’re doing today isn’t going to get you where you need to be tomorrow — and the advent of generative AI (GenAI) underscores this. GenAI has lowered the bar to creating new content — whether it’s text, code, images, video or audio — offering family businesses a potential shortcut to improving how they operate, innovate, make decisions and compete in the market.
The next generation of family business leaders has taken notice. According to PwC’s 2024 Global NextGen Survey, 73% of NextGen leaders said they believe that AI is a powerful force for transformation, but they question their ability to capitalize on it. Additionally, the 2024 PwC Global CEO Survey showed that 70% of business leaders believe that GenAI will significantly change the way their business creates, delivers and captures value.
Consider that in a traditional model an employee may execute several tasks, leading to a bottleneck effect if there aren’t enough employees available to help. With GenAI, that employee can prompt the system to execute several tasks that can run in parallel. The employee is still necessary to review the completed work, but tasks can be processed faster, with less manual effort. That helps improve productivity, reduce errors and streamline operations.
In short, GenAI may allow family businesses to create much-needed capacity without adding additional employees. Or, put another way, it may be an opportunity to lead the disruption rather than being left behind. That’s why it may be imperative to act now on GenAI — and to get it right.
With any new technology, particularly one as novel and complex as GenAI, unanticipated consequences introduce potential risks. Regardless of whether your company pursues GenAI, others — including bad actors — will use the technology, so it’s important to prepare your company with responsible AI policies and enhanced cybersecurity.
Here are three steps your company can take today, even if its GenAI strategy is not yet underway.
- Educate and communicate with your employees. Even if your company is not actively pursuing GenAI, your employees may already be experimenting with free tools on the web, providing the potential to feed your company’s data into publicly available systems. Mitigate your risk by setting a clear acceptable use policy and clearly communicating that guidance to your employees.
- Implement responsible AI principles. Understand the six major categories of risk — from bias to legal risks — to help prepare your company. According to the PwC’s Global NextGen Survey, 62% of leaders believe that the business should have AI governance, but they have not yet defined this.
- Enlist help now. For a family business, it may make sense to contract with outside vendors to develop strategies for GenAI and enhanced cybersecurity tools, controls and monitoring. Establishing those relationships and having incident response protocols in place before you experience an event can help you better prepare.
Go deeper on GenAI
- Watch Family Business Magazine’s recent webinar with PwC’s Private Family Business and Family Office leaders John Boles and Danielle Valkner.
- For more on the minds of the new generation of family business leaders, read “PwC’s Global NextGen Survey 2024.”
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