Friends, GenAI and the debate on How Quickly the World Will Change

I must admit, with the hype around GenAI fading, while it is still critical discussion in a business set up, I was hoping that this would come up less and less in everyday discussions, especially among friends.

On a recent trip, I caught up with a few old friends from my IIMC days. It was an interesting group: a successful entrepreneur known for being bold and transformative, an investor focused on the tech space who I was meeting for the first time in 25 years (though it did not feel like that at all, there is something about friends from college!) and I, a career consultant. The running joke was that out of the three of us, only one was doing any real work—you can guess who!

The conversation veered towards GenAI. What really drove the conversation was the investor’s strong belief in GenAI. He’s investing behind it with full conviction that it’s going to change the world in ways we can’t even begin to imagine yet. The entrepreneur had transformed his business by challenging conventional approaches, building a platform to solve for workflows and in the process dramatically improved productivity of his team. He continues to believe that all workflows carry significant inefficiency and was beginning to think about GenAI’s power to solve that. He’s experimenting with GenAI e.g. read foreign language contracts, saving time and lawyer fees. For him, the impact is tangible, and he sees it playing out day-to-day in his business.

I’ve started using GenAI myself for some tasks—prepping for client meetings, doing quick research, seeking organized data and metrics - all of this cutting down the time I’d normally need from our research team. It’s been a useful tool, but I was surprised to learn that I’m actually one of the top users of it in my organization. I was wondering - am I such a prolific user? Therein was also an interesting insight – changing ways of working and adoption takes time. If you combine with individual motivations, organizational dynamics - the pace of change is more gradual.

This led to an interesting debate. My investor friend has the conviction that the world will look very different in two years. The entrepreneur, on the other hand, is keen to learn more and benefit from this in his venture and also create new opportunities. As someone who’s been part of large transformation programs I believe change takes time. Champions can be trained quickly, but change@scale has its own pace

We all agreed that the technology is real, and its potential to transform is undeniable. However, while the investor sees a big changes in two years, the entrepreneur is convinced it will continue to be more meaningful in its impact, and I believe the real challenge will be navigating the change. What remains certain is that GenAI is no longer a distant concept—it's here, and it's starting to shift how we operate. The question isn’t if it will change the world, but how quickly we can adapt to keep up. One way or another, we’ll all be part of this transformation.