Another GenAI moment & some reflections

It was an aha moment while discussing a research project with the team. The conversation was underway on how we will collect the data and I asked about a tool that the team had built and I was told how a GenAI based tool would collect and synthesize information across many parameters for thousands of companies. It made me think: how much time would this have taken in an earlier era, where every company would have to be manually researched and data combined. Yes, we would have leveraged some external resources, but the hours consumed would have been tremendous. ?The next thought was – would we even have attempted this back then? The realization was clear:, this is real. This is real impact on productivity.

I find myself increasingly using these tools. Often time it is my briefing notes before a senior client meeting to catch up on recent developments, performance of the company etc. Of late it is with simple queries to generate a table with a set of data points across companies. This has been quite a revelation. Benchmarking, comparison, trend analysis is immediate. At least the directional view. I don’t yet feel comfortable using the output without applying my smell test (so this is not taking away the need for expertise) and also don’t feel confident using the specific data without cross checking (or end up using as a range). But this gives a very good start

Productivity impact is there. For some use-cases it is massive – a comparative analysis will take an analyst to dig up company data across sources or find some database and then plot it. This is less than 1 min now.. In some cases, it is changing what is possible. The fact that we could do this analysis, the fact that today with GenAI it is possible to sample 100% of the calls vs. much lower number that were listened to for quality in the manual world. Some examples of what is becoming possible. In all cases, it has not yet transformed the business model, even though the shifts are real and visible.

This brings me to the bigger question - as technology trends unfold over time, how do we step back and recognize the larger shifts? At what point, the incremental productivity gains go beyond a tipping point and create transformative change or innovation in business model. How does one harness this shift and what is the characteristics of leaders, companies that will capture disproportionate value

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