Generative AI: hype or the future of customer experience?

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How should organizations think about generative AI??

That was the first question we asked Liz Miller , Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc. , during her Insights Unlocked podcast interview with our CMO Michelle Huff at The Human Insight Summit (THiS) in Seattle last month.?

Miller’s response??

“First and foremost, it is not — and let me repeat this — it is not a Ron Popeil chicken machine,” Miller said.??

Legendary infomercial pitchman Ron Popeil could sell just about anything, including his ‘magical’ chicken machine that all you had to do was “set it, and forget it.”? But there was no special magic to what was essentially just a rotisserie oven.

?“We’re all thinking of AI like it’s this weird Ron Popeil chicken machine,” Miller said.?

She said companies need to shift their perception away from viewing generative AI as a simple “set it and forget it” solution.

Instead, Miller said, “we have to really start to think how we want to put them into action, how to apply them. There needs to be a business use case, as with all technologies.”

Generative AI applications could add trillions of dollars to the global economy across all industries. McKinsey and Company analyzed 63 use cases for generative AI most of which umbrellaed under customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D.

Recent McKinsey research estimates that generative AI has the potential to unlock $4.4 trillion global productivity over the next decades and has the potential to drive a 5-15 percent increase in total marketing spending and a 3-5 percent surge in sales productivity.

“Something always has to come first. Something has to come first to unlock our imagination of what we could do with technology. And I think that is where we are right now with generative AI

Miller said generative AI has been the key that has “unlocked the door” for so many projects across large enterprises. But she urged companies to remember that the true value lies in how these models are applied rather than the models themselves.

“There has to be a strategy and there has to be a remembrance that what makes these models amazing is not the model itself.”

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