The Real Business Value of GenAI: It's Not About the AI
"Most organizations are still struggling to realize tangible business value from Generative AI investments." - This is a sentiment we keep hearing from analysts and business leaders alike, and they're not wrong. But here's why, and more importantly, what to do about it.
The Technology Trap
The most profound and revolutionary technologies seem to always start with a search for a solution - or in more layman's terms, a hammer in search of a nail. Generative AI is no exception.
This was in full display when I attended NVIDIA's GTC conference in March of 2024. The buzz was electric, centered around new processors and training hardware being released to train bigger and more powerful foundation models (like those from OpenAI and Anthropic).
While standing around a massive rack server with water cooling systems capable of training trillion-parameter models (that's 1,000,000,000,000!), I turned to my neighbor who was clearly impressed and asked, "What are you doing with GenAI?" His enthusiasm quickly turned to a perplexed expression as he answered, "Not much." I asked many others at the conference the same question and received similar responses. We were all excited about the technology, but few of us actually knew what to do with it. This made me wonder, "Are we all being duped?"
Finding Real Value
Fast forward nine months (I'm writing this on December 28, 2024), and while some of the hype has settled, the promise of Generative AI remains strong. Not only do I believe that, I see it every day among my peers. Software engineers have embraced this technology because it's become integrated into our daily lives.
Take companies like Cursor, who have seen remarkable growth by building AI directly into developers' existing workflows. We're adopting these tools not because they're AI, but because they augment how we work by eliminating tedious and repetitive coding tasks. This is the secret to winning with AI: stop thinking about winning with AI and start building it into the applications your workforce already uses!
The Human Element
Humans are creative and inventive; AI is not. What Generative AI excels at is mimicking existing intelligence and behavior it has been trained on. This makes it perfect for handling the mundane tasks that fill your workday but don't leverage your experience and expertise - think note-taking in endless meetings, summarizing hundreds of pages of reports, building repetitive Excel sheets, or conducting web research. These are tasks traditionally handed to junior analysts, but now AI can handle them more efficiently.
The Path Forward
The time is now to shift your focus from the hype of AI to how your organization can thoughtfully integrate these tools into existing workflows and applications. It's not about the AI - it's about empowering your employees to bring more value to your business and customers. When your systems and applications become catalysts for people to do what they do best - create and invent - adoption will happen organically. And once it does, the business value of these technologies will be exponential.
Good luck, and godspeed.