It’s not just hype and it’s not a magic pill, but genAI seems here to stay. Is your business taking advantage — or getting left behind?
Is your business using generative AI (genAI) yet? If not, you’re now in the minority — and businesses that are too slow to adapt may miss out.
A reliable report from McKinsey found that three-fourths of businesses are now using AI in some capacity, and generative AI use is quickly on the rise.
What Is Generative AI (GenAI)?
Generative AI refers to the kind of artificial intelligence tools that can generate information, like text, images, computer code, and even video. This tech is what powers tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Copilot, Gemini, and others. It’s a new type of technology that processes and synthesises information differently than the way computers have done so in the past.
What Can GenAI Do?
A lot. But not everything, and not always, well, accurately.
GenAI is really, really impressive at some tasks. Ask it to diagnose problems in the code you just wrote, and it’ll do so almost instantly. It can generate first drafts of emails, blog posts, and just about any other text-based content. It’s great at taking information you give it (or information it can access) and reformulating that material.
For example, I recently had a list of items I wanted to compare with pros and cons and so forth. I knew it would look better as a table than as a paragraph or even a bulleted list, but I just…couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
So I turned to ChatGPT: I gave it all of my information, told it not to change what I had actually said, but to organize that information into a table. Bam, 3 seconds later I had a perfectly serviceable table.
Is GenAI “Wrong”? Does It Lie?
The big, big issue with genAI remains accuracy. It “speaks” in ways that sound almost human, and it almost always speaks with what we human folks would interpret as confidence. Even when it’s just making stuff up.
Going back to my table example: I could’ve asked ChatGPT to build that table from “scratch” rather than giving ChatGPT what I wanted the table to say. And it probably would have done a pretty decent job. But very likely some of the entries on the table would be untethered from reality: nonexistent features, irrelevant facts, or unsupported claims.
This goes back to what genAI is actually doing. It’s been trained on absolutely massive amounts of information, including thousands (maybe millions) of “pro/con” tables. So when I ask it to create one, it knows in the aggregate what most similar lists tend to say. Then, like a superpowered version of your phone’s suggestive autocomplete, it makes calculations about what the most likely next bit of information I would want to see would be, based on my prompt.
How Businesses Are Successfully Using GenAI Today
Think of genAI tools as your smartest, but also dumbest, research assistant. It knows more than you ever could about just about everything, but it doesn’t always know how to use that information properly, making mistakes that us humans would think of as obvious, dumb, or even deceitful.
So:
- Use genAI to generate a first draft of a low-stakes document. But edit it carefully, and don’t accept details as true just because they sound confident.
- Use genAI to pull together mockups of graphics, logos, and the like. But always pull in the pros when those graphical elements are important or will go public.
- Use genAI to craft pieces of code or to check your human programmers’ work, but don’t implement genAI-created code without careful testing.
- Use genAI to augment, not replace, your code testing processes.
If you’re new to the idea of embracing genAI for your business, we get it. And we can help you roll it out right. Reach out anytime!