Harnessing AI to Help Humans Win, Every Day | By Ashish Babu, CMO at Tata Consultancy Services Europe & UK

By?Ashish Babu,?CMO at?Tata Consultancy Services Europe & UK.

During the?EACD Summit 2023,?together with?Sebastian Hoff,?Strategic Advisor at Staffbase, Ashish discussed his digital optimism and how we can harness the potential of artificial intelligence in communications.

This blog offers valuable insights into the topic.

Since the launch of ChatGPT-4, AI has grabbed our collective attention. Is this a force threatening our jobs, or could even make humans obsolete?

AI is not the first technology that’s been met with scepticism and anxiety. In the late 1800s, electricity was feared as an “unrestrained demon” when it made cities light up for the first time. A century on, the introduction of the calculator led to protests by maths teachers, presumably fearing its impact on pupils’ learning – and their own jobs.?

Just as these inventions eventually became part of our daily lives, so will AI. Once we can overcome the fear factor and learn how best to use AI, it could have unmatched potential to transform our lives for the better.

Overcoming the hype cycle

AI is at the height of the hype cycle right now, and there’s a mix of excitement, fear, paranoia and experimentation that goes with that. To get over this stage and make AI deliver on its promise, we need to approach it with intelligence and purpose, capitalising on the advantages AI can bring.

In the early days, AI’s biggest impact was in automating tasks that were repetitive, standardised and predictable.

But anyone who’s played with generative AI such as ChatGPT knows that its contextual awareness and ability to handle unstructured data has grown substantially. This opens up new opportunities in areas as diverse as drug discovery, fraud detection and customer service.

Delivering delight and surprise

?If, historically, AI delivered the computing grunt needed to take on mundane tasks, then generative AI is there to delight and surprise.

As marketers, this is an exciting prospect because it will allow us to deliver better customer value.

AI may give us the toolkit to hyper-personalise the customer experience and build new products and services that would not previously have been possible. This includes enhancing the creative process for ads and marketing collateral – whether it’s writing social media posts or creating visuals.

Visual design is a good example of the benefits AI can bring. Creating a new visual used to take a designer up to 12 hours before AI, but this can now be done in a matter of seconds.

Democratising technology

While many of the AI applications making headlines may seem to challenge the role of humans in the value chain, I’d encourage you to take a different view.

I remember when the first iPhone launched in 2007, it felt like such a watershed moment. It put a huge amount of technological potential at the disposal of the masses. Now, generative AI is empowering us in a similar way. It is not an elusive tool confined to some ivory tower. It’s democratised computing power that is entirely in our hands.

We need measures in place to stay firmly in control rather than be subsumed by AI, including an in-depth understanding of the models and their pitfalls.

But we must harness AI’s incredible power to help us humans win, every day. We’ve done it with electricity and the calculator and many other awe-inspiring technologies. I’m confident the same will happen with AI, too.?

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