Generative AI: A Glimpse into the Future of Business
Insights from Icarus Media Digital
DISCLAIMER: A human wrote this article
Generative AI is hard to miss. Tools such as ChatGPT are increasingly becoming household names, and conversations about how AI is changing how we work are common. While businesses are considering how to safely reap the benefits of generative AI, many workers are focusing on not being replaced by it.
At Icarus Media Digital, we’ve been exploring the role that generative AI can play in our mission to transform ideas into successful, scalable businesses.
In this article, we’ll share our learnings on generative AI’s implications, opportunities, and threats for business.
What is generative AI?
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that can generate new content, such as text, images, or music, at huge volumes. This AI technology deeply studies large amounts of existing content to learn patterns, themes and connections among the data points. From there, it can create new, original content based on those patterns.
Standard AI employs set rules and patterns and therefore has rigidity in how it works. In comparison, generative AI is much more fluid due to its machine learning, enabling it to learn and generate new outputs constantly.
A well-known and accessible example is ChatGPT from OpenAI, which encourages humans and machines to collaborate in finding answers and creating content. For every prompt that a human puts into ChatGPT, it can respond with outputs that reflect the patterns it learned from its databank. It’s simple to use and has a free option, making it a popular tool.
We are still early in the journey of what Generative AI technology can do. It’s becoming cheaper to train AI models, and new tools are launching weekly, many of which are accessible through free accounts with functionality that may be limited compared to premium access.
Businesses are also starting to tap into the potential of generative AI, with data from Salesforce showing that approximately three out of five workers (61%) currently use or plan to use generative AI, and 81% of IT leaders expect that AI will play a prominent role in their organisations.
The potential of generative AI for businesses
Generative AI is starting to revolutionise how we work. However, its use and benefits create challenges and risks that businesses must carefully consider and mitigate.
Opportunities
Starting with the benefits, generative AI is currently opening up the following possibilities for businesses:
● New perspectives: No more danger of writer’s or creative’s block! Generative AI can help us become more creative through the seemingly unlimited number of new ideas it can generate. It can visualise and simulate existing data in new ways, enabling employees to gain new insights. For example, AI has created new diagnostic tools in the healthcare industry and developed new investment strategies in the financial services industry.
● Product creation: Generative AI can create ideas for new products and services and deliver them right through to product design, packaging and marketing campaigns. By churning out volumes of ideas, it’s likely to generate some that stick and are novel. Emerging AI tools will also scan your customer feedback to summarise it and suggest product enhancements.
● Automation: Generative AI effectively automates tasks that do not require a high level of human skill, saving costs in the process. Examples include data entry, responses to frequently asked questions and content creation for marketing. Since it takes over repetitive work, AI liberates human creativity so we can focus on meaningful creative work, like perfecting concepts or having genuine human-to-human interactions.
● Customer service: Generative AI chatbots can respond to customers and potential clients around the clock, answering queries and troubleshooting. More immediate responses tend to lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
● Personalisation: Generative AI can create personalised content, including images, at a massive scale. Positive, personalised experiences tend to enhance a company’s reputation, increase customer engagement and lead to repeat purchases. Personalisation can take the form of personal product recommendations, a personalised news feed and personalised advertising.
Threats
On the flip side, generative AI comes with some challenges and risks that businesses should manage proactively, including:
● Bias: Any bias inherent in the data points generative AI has been training on will flow through to the outputs. This bias leads to a real risk of reinforced prejudice, discrimination, and misinformation widely circulating from AI tools. Businesses must be mindful of this risk and have mitigation strategies to protect their reputation.
● Inconsistency: Generative AI models are complex. They can deliver results that seem odd or contradict themselves, which is problematic when businesses use the tools for their perceived reliability and accuracy. Organisations should plan out the necessary human oversight and intervention to ensure the AI outputs meet quality standards.
● Loss of authenticity and uniqueness: While generative AI can save time and cost, its outputs tend to lack a distinct person or organisation’s unique voice, personality and overall authenticity. In some cases, AI outputs are uninspiring and robotic. Copy and paste of this type of content will erode a brand’s personality and reputation over time, resulting in less customer attraction and retention. Human creativity is likely still to be needed in the process to ensure AI outputs are authentic.
● Job losses: AI automation is leading to job losses and reduced contracting and freelancing opportunities in fields such as customer service, data entry and marketing. The more advanced AI gets, the more human jobs it will be able to replace and, therefore, the increased pressure there will be on humans to focus on upskilling in areas that are not easily replaceable, or that there is a market to pay a premium for a human touch in, for example, there remains a strong demand for human to human therapy.
● Increased competition: Generative AI can lower market entry barriers, enabling new businesses to compete at lower price points. A competitor may use generative AI to automate tasks or generate unique product designs, giving them an advantage in the market. For example, generative AI may enable a new marketing company to offer more personalised campaigns at a lower price than incumbents not using generative AI to its full benefit.
● Data security: Companies have been cautious about adopting AI due to concerns about the potential for data breaches. If generative AI tools train on large datasets containing sensitive information like customer data, there would be significant reputational risks if that data were hacked and stolen. Equally, there are risks that data sets could be manipulated by injecting malicious data into the training datasets, resulting in incorrect and potentially harmful outputs, such as fake news. Any bias in the data sets would also result in biased outcomes.
AI use cases: technical development and marketing
Two areas where there is significant scope to benefit from generative AI in business are technical development and marketing.
The use cases in technical development include:
● Capitalising on AI to quickly develop new, improved products and services.
● Rapid prototyping of products and services to facilitate quick testing and the ability to get early customer feedback that then drives the next level of development in a customer-focused way.
● Testing for technical and security issues to ensure your products and services are robust.
While the above steps should increase the chances of developing a great product, you still need great marketing to attract paying customers. Here, generative AI can help in the following ways:
● Developing a volume of creative marketing campaign ideas and refining them.
● Creating personalised content that resonates more deeply with each individual and encourages higher conversion rates.
● Targeting advertising to ensure you spend your advertising budget wisely, reaching those who are most likely to buy.
● Task automation to free up people’s time and costs from more routine tasks such as simple customer responses, social media and lead generation.
Conclusion: The future of generative AI
Generative AI is an eye-watering mix of potential, innovation, efficiency, excitement and optimisation, coupled with genuine concerns for reputation, uniqueness and accuracy.
Our perspective at Icarus Media Digital is that businesses that fail to engage with AI will fall behind. As lead generators, inventors and change-makers, shaking things up and disrupting industries and ways of working is part of our DNA.
That being said, we believe in the intelligent use of generative AI. Right now, it needs skilled human oversight when testing and refining its use in your organisation and we are just experiencing the tip of the iceberg of what generative AI can do for businesses.
We predict generative AI will become increasingly capable, versatile and accessible, creating more and more opportunities for businesses brave enough to tap into its potential.
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