Generative AI: The New Age of the Robots

Building Maths Driven Organizations

Today’s most successful businesses are essentially maths organizations that seek to master sophisticated #algorithms that make sense of data to be able to predict behaviour and anticipate actions to generate desired outcomes.?Amazon, Google, eBay and Netflix have understood this and have successfully turned their algorithms into gold.?It is no wonder therefore that the use of #artificialintelligence is progressively emerging from the depths of science fiction to become a scientific reality for most businesses.

Artificial Intelligence - myth or reality

For decades, Artificial Intelligence has inspired many moviemakers or novelists to create an uprising of robots against the human race.?In a way, it plays on a real fear we humans feel that one day we may become victims of our creations. When hearing an eminent professor such as Stephen Hawking state in a BBC interview that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”, it does send some shivers down your spine.

Artificial Intelligence has been in the making for several years now, but its capabilities have been limited to understanding, interpreting, and learning from existing patterns of data for a specific purpose.?#generativeai technologies have become game changers as machines have evolved from #learning and understanding existing patterns of data to generating and creating new data.?Indeed, technology has moved from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to #Artificialcreativity (AC) mirroring characteristics that were considered largely human attributes until recently.?

The Power of Generative AI

In simplistic terms, generative AI technologies can essentially create three forms of data including (i) text, (ii) sound, and (iii) visual forms.?Although such creative capabilities may appear to be deceptively basic, they have opened a pandora’s box of what could potentially be achieved not only in business but also in our lifestyle in general.?In my view, Artificial Creativity (AC) arising from AI generative technology such as #ChatGpt is likely to impact business and society in four main areas namely (i) Research and Innovation, (ii) Knowledge and Learning, (iii) Visualisation and Interpretation and (iv) Communication and Interaction.

Research and Innovation

The potential use cases to apply AI Generative technology in research and innovation are limitless. Gartner identifies five research and design areas that could potentially be heavily influenced by this technology.?These include drug design, materials science, chip design, generation of synthetic data, and design of parts.?These capabilities have direct applications in the pharmaceutical, engineering, manufacturing, and automotive industries.

Learning and Development

In turn, knowledge and learning will be completely revolutionized as generative AI applications are expected to improve the experience of learners through Personalisation, Availability, and Resilience.?More specifically, the training and education in both academia and on the place of work will be transformed from an intermittent process (constrained by the physical time of a human being) to a continuous process.?Moreover, as the algorithm acquires tacit knowledge across several sources amplified through the availability of multiple communities of practice made up of multi-disciplinary experts on a global scale, such knowledge may be synthesized, repurposed, and/or reframed in a personalized format that renders learning to the user more effective and on an ongoing basis.

Generation of Audio Visual Material

Perhaps, my greatest fascination with Generative AI technologies is their capability of generating new images and sounds through visualization and interpretation.?The most obvious beneficiaries of these capabilities are organizations in the entertainment and gaming industries as the creative process of generating the required audio-visual material becomes progressively automated.?However, there are less usual suspects that stand a lot to gain from these capabilities.?For example, the health industry may benefit from creating enhanced and/or more refined diagnostic images that could help uncover problems earlier on.?The security industry may also benefit from obtaining images of persons of interest captured across several cameras at different angles and recreating a realistic image of how such a person looks based on these fragments.?

Communication and Interaction

Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that the most obvious application of generative AI technologies lies in the enhancement of communication and interaction with customers.?Most of us have already experienced this to some extent through chatbots deployed as an aid for customer service.?However generative AI technologies take on interaction to a whole new level.?The key difference lies in the fact that whereas traditional chatbots reply to customers based on a set of pre-ordained responses, generative AI technologies have the capability of creating new customized responses based on specific queries raised by customers. This renders a conversation between customers and the interface as being remarkably human.?Could such interactions be robust enough to pass the Turing Test???In the short to medium term, I expect that we will be experiencing an explosion in the use of this technology specifically to manage customer interactions as this is likely to be the easiest to implement whilst capturing low-hanging fruit for most industries.??