What does ChatGPT, the “fastest-growing consumer application in history,” mean for the future of work? More broadly, will generative AI soon graduate from the being the latest consumer entertainment to become a significant business application and a new basis for competitive advantage? And are enterprises ready for AI, any type of AI?
Forrester just published a report on generative AI that tells its enterprise clients not to ignore or downplay its impact.Enterprises should start right now to experiment with generative AI, recommends Forrester, focusing on existing processes that can be enhanced by technologies “that leverage massive corpuses of data, including large language models, to generate new content (e.g., text, video, images, audio, code).”
It would be “a costly mistake,” says Forrester, to ignore the potential of generative AI to enable production of content at scale, to accelerate the speed and precision of data science practices and app development, to produce synthetic data for training AI and machine learning models, and to provide new defense opportunities for security professionals. In short, generative AI presents an opportunity to augment and even automate existing work processes in IT, marketing, customer service and other business functions.
ChatGPT was made publicly available on November 30, 2022, and given the attention that PR stunt has received, it is safe to label the era before that date as B.G. (Before Generative AI). We are now living in the new and exciting and frightening G.A (generative AI) era, where executive FOMO may lead to embarrassing public failures (as in Google, that started paying attention to G.A. already in 2017, losing $100 billion in market value in one day).
Are enterprises ready for the new era, for the pressures to do something about generative AI, even just careful experimentation, as Forrester recommends?
We can get a sense of the state of AI in the enterprise by looking at recent surveys of business and IT executives, reporting about their current experiences with AI. The surveys—by Deloitte, cnvrg.io, Run:ai, andLXT—have been conducted over the six months just before the arrival of the G.A. era so they reflect what the respondents knew about “generic AI,” not necessarily generative AI.
Perceptions of AI are certainly positive in the business world. 94% (Deloitte) say that AI is critical to success over the next five years and 89% (cnvrg.io) are seeing the benefits of their AI solutions. At 48% of organizations, “AI is in production, or already part of the business DNA” (LXT). 91% of companies are planning to increase their GPU capacity or other AI infrastructure by an average of 23% in the next 12 months per the Run:ai survey, which concludes that “despite the uncertain economic climate, companies are still investing in AI due to the potential and value they see in it.”
According to the Deloitte survey, 79% say they have fully deployed three or more AI applications, up from 62% the year before, with top applications being cloud pricing optimization, voice assistants, chatbots and conversational AI, predictive maintenance, and uptime/reliability optimization. LXT found that Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech/voice recognition solutions are the most highly deployed AI applications, followed by predictive analytics and conversational AI.
But challenges abound.
