What is the GenAI Opportunity About?

AI has been used as a decision-making tool for decades, resulting in breakthrough use cases such as spam filtering, fraud detection, and, more recently, self-driving cars and semi-autonomous robots.

Generative AI, which gained mainstream popularity in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, is a new type of AI that encompasses models capable of mimicking human behavior by creating content (text, images, audio, and video) in response to user prompts.

GenAI is made possible by several concurrent technological advances: novel training algorithms based on the Transformer architecture (2017), the broad availability of powerful chips, and the digital availability of vast human knowledge on the internet. These advances underpin foundation models, which can be further trained, fine-tuned, orchestrated, and prompted to achieve specific objectives.

Using GenAI, businesses can automate an increasing number of human activities, particularly those that do not require substantial interaction with the physical world. Companies can leverage GenAI to deliver better value to their customers at a lower cost. If they don't, they risk being displaced by AI-first competitors.

Most of the business value from GenAI initiatives is likely to come from software engineering and IT, customer operations/customer service, sales and marketing (along the entire customer acquisition and retention funnel), and product development operations (especially product documentation). Additional opportunities can be found in supply chain, procurement, risk management, and compliance.

That said, the technology is evolving rapidly, and many applications are not mature yet. GenAI transformation is a journey rather than a blueprint.

For businesses, especially mid-sized companies with limited resources, this means finding a balance between launching short-term experiments and building long-term internal capabilities that deliver business value.

In this blog post, we discuss a possible roadmap for GenAI adoption and highlight some key challenges to watch out for.