The AI industry has seen significant evolution over the past years, with generative AI continuing to provide the runway for a new wave of innovation.
Generative AI has delivered value to businesses, stakeholders, and customers, enabling new forms of innovation, creation, and collaboration across various sectors.
These innovations are as broad reaching as improving early stage research for pharmaceutical development, fighting global criminal syndicates, or using AI to turn a mass of customer feedback data into actionable insights.
As the tech landscape continues to evolve, AI and other technologies will play pivotal roles in shaping the future of innovation and productivity.
Here’s five ways businesses can take advantage of generative AI:
Building on the right foundations and using the right data
Businesses looking to ensure the right foundations for AI innovation will first need to look to its facilitator: cloud computing, particularly through platforms like AWS. Despite AI’s ascent, cloud technology remains a transformative force, reshaping the IT landscape.
Roughly 90% of IT spending still gravitates towards on-premises setups, but the cloud is altering this paradigm, playing a vital role in managing the infrastructure for AI workloads. While AI grabs headlines, the cloud quietly handles significant tasks crucial to successful innovation, like data and infrastructure management.
Business spending is reflecting this move. In Australia alone, Gartner forecasts public cloud expenditure to break 50% of the addressable market this year, reaching AU$23.billion.
GenAI: first and foremost a tool to improve efficiency
With myriad AI tools coming into the market, GenAI should be a boon for productivity for small businesses if used effectively.
For example, developers express a strong need for improved documentation to enhance productivity, and GenAI tools like ChatGPT offer a rich but challenging resource in this regard.
While many developers primarily view these tools for code generation, their real value lies in code analysis. Rather than expecting AI tools to handle all aspects of programming, developers should leverage them to automate mundane tasks, freeing them to focus on critical aspects and boosting confidence.
The emphasis is on using AI as a coding assistant to alleviate tedium rather than as a replacement for all programming tasks.
Ensuring your business is utilising genAI in the right areas is key to actually boosting your productivity.
Balancing hype and reality in AI adoption
The main challenge in adopting AI in programming lies in finding the right balance of expectations—avoiding both over-hyping and underestimating its capabilities.
Over-hyping may lead to businesses becoming overly reliant on tools like ChatGPT to perform writing tasks better suited to a person who understands their company, or developers to rely too heavily on tools like Amazon CodeWhisperer resulting in bugs and issues. AI should enhance, not replace, your team’s skills. Businesses need to understand AI’s limitations, identify errors, and prompt fixes or address them themselves.
Conversely, low expectations discourage the use of AI tools, preventing exploration of their potential benefits. The focus should be on testing different tools, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and leveraging them effectively rather than expecting them to do all the work autonomously.
Augmenting, not replacing, human expertise
As AI takes center stage, it’s crucial to remember that human expertise remains indispensable. Decision makers and organisations need to acknowledge the importance of human oversight, fact-checking, and quality control when integrating AI tools.
Through leveraging GenAI tools to augment human capabilities, organisations can derive significant benefits while minimizing the risk of errors.
One example is how fintech Monoova used technology to scale its business at a fraction of the manpower required. By using external software it has freed up its developer team for high value work bringing new products to market faster.
GenAI in action
GenAI is now unleashing a wave of innovation. Many organizations are taking advantage of technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and more to create AI-driven products, services, and apps.
Amongst those that are blazing new trails in the AI space are two Australian start-ups: Pending AI, which is helping scientists and researchers in the pharmaceutical space improve early research & development stages, and Eclipse AI, a company that unifies and analyses omnichannel voice-of-customer data to give customers actionable intelligence to drive retention.
Both companies needed a developer data platform to unify operational, analytical, and generative AI data services to streamline building their AI-enriched applications, and both are breaking new ground in their industries powered by AI.
The technological landscape now promises a harmonious fusion of AI, cloud technology, and innovative work methodologies.
Organisations that navigate these advancements with agility, strategic foresight, and a commitment to diversity are poised to thrive in the evolving digital era.
This era marks an exciting chapter in tech evolution – one that invites organisations to stay tuned for the unfolding possibilities and shape the future of the digital realm.
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