GenAI-hype or reality

AI-hype or reality?

I have been in the tech industry for over 30 years, and I am passionate about leveraging technology to positively impact human progress. Over the years, I’ve done that for many large organizations like Oracle, Infor, Dell, Informatica etc. Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and whether it is all hype or reality.

AI-is it hype or reality? I’d like to start by-Why is it called artificial intelligence? It’s a combination of those two words. There is definitely intelligence, but it is not human intelligence. It is intelligence that is driven by computing technology, and that’s why it’s called artificial intelligence. In many ways, it can be far more effective at doing certain tasks than human intelligence, because you have the power of computational processing.

It’s important to recognize that AI is never going to eliminate human intelligence. In its optimal form, it’s going to supplement and make human intelligence better, and we’ll drill into that shortly, Right at the outset, it’s important for people to recognize that, because there’s so much talk about how artificial intelligence and Generative AI, which is a subset of AI, is going to eliminate human jobs and make people redundant-we’re all going to be replaced by robots, and we’re all going to be eliminated. That’s not at all the case.

If anything, it’s a great time to be alive. It’s a great time to be living and working and being an entrepreneur, because if we leverage AI and Generative AI, we can make our lives and the lives of others so much more productive, valuable, fulfilling and significant. So that’s the promise of AI. Like any other technology, there need to be guardrails around it. There are major ethical and legal concerns with privacy, usability, governance and security which need to be in place to make it more meaningful and safer for widespread adoption and democratization.

Demystifying AI terms

I’m sure you’ve read and heard about some of these terms- Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Responsible AI, Conversational AI etc. Adequate guardrails need to be put in place to ensure that the AI is responsible, safe, bias free, secure and trustworthy, and to engender democratization of that technology. The same thing happened when new technology like smartphones was introduced, or when the internet came about, or when electricity was invented, or when the steam engine was first introduced. Who does that and who is responsible for orchestrating the safeguards and guardrails?

There’s a role that government plays. There’s a role that countries and nation states play. There’s a role that academic institutions play. There’s a role that corporations play, and there’s a role that societies play. All of those stakeholders combine and get together to create those guardrails to make sure that the new technology is being utilized correctly and is being positively implemented, to minimize its downsides. You can never eliminate the risk, but you can minimize it and manage it better, and that’s what is critical.

Scale of AI

To put things in context, let’s talk a little about the scale of AI. It’s not a fad or just hype. I did some research, and here are some interesting datapoints- by 2030, so in another six years, artificial intelligence will add $15.7 trillion to world GDP, increasing it by 14%. That is a lot- it is a concrete phenomenon that is going to significantly increase world GDP (gross domestic product). I’m not talking about just the US, because this is a technology that has global domain, and it’s not restricted to any one country.

Another interesting statistic is that every day, more than 1 billion new words are being created by Generative AI- that is the equivalent of an additional million books being published each day. Generative AI, as the name suggests, is focusing on creating new content and generating new information that did not exist before. There is a lot of press about Generative AI, which is a subset of AI. Think about it like this, artificial intelligence is where we are leveraging patterns by looking at existing information to identify certain behaviors, whereas Generative AI is creating new patterns and new information which will provide insight to people and businesses.

Some people are worried about whether we will be able to maintain control of AI. That is a valid question and that’s where the guardrails come in- legislation, ethical, social, security, privacy and economic aspects. The critical factor for all of this is data, and the quality of the data, as artificial intelligence is operating on the data that is available. So, if the data is of good quality, the output will be of good quality. If the data is bad and is poor, then the intelligence that operates on that is going to give you outputs and insight that will not be of high quality. Gartner states, “By 2027, AI assistants and AI-enhanced workflows incorporated into data integration tools will reduce manual intervention by 60% and enable self-service data management.”

I am not saying that we have all the answers, and I am not saying that data is the only critical aspect. There are many factors that will make this live up to the promise of positively impacting human lives. It is a promise. It is not fulfilled fully and completely, but there is hope. So that’s one thing. Secondly, GenAI is a relatively new technology. AI existed for a long time, but it’s really gained in popularity after ChatGPT, which was introduced in November 2022.  It’s very new, and we’re still trying to figure all this out, but the promise is there, and there are certain areas and use cases that it is already impacting.

Humans and the role of human interpretation, emotion, empathy, leadership and the ability to understand nuanced behavior are important aspects, and machines cannot replace that or do a better job on that than we can. However, there are certain things that GenAI is doing very well.

Nvidia released its results recently. Nvidia is the company that manufactures chips that power all this computation for artificial intelligence to work. It did over $30 billion in the second quarter of 2024. The valuation of the company is over $3 trillion- so they’re doing something right. All this artificial intelligence and Generative AI needs a lot of computational power to do all these things, and if you’re manufacturing semiconductors and chips that enable that to happen, you’re going to do really well.

Deloitte just studied and surveyed 2620 global businesses on how they are leveraging generative AI-94% of businesses said that AI would boost their business in the next five years. 44% said that they use AI for cloud pricing optimization, and 41% for Voice Assistance Chatbots and conversational AI. We are all familiar with Siri and Alexa, and other voice assistants. I was coming back from Atlanta recently and I got a notification that my Delta airlines flight from Atlanta to Austin was delayed. I got a message on my screen which said- “Hey, do you want to look at a different flight?” That was a proactive message that I acted on easily and seamlessly.

Popular GenAI use cases

We are familiar with these kinds of things, which make our life better, because now it’s easy. I can quickly change my flight and do all that, but it doesn’t replace the human involvement where relevant and needed. Email spam filters is another use case-if you want to send out mass email today to an organization and target all their employees, it’s not going to go through because there are email blockers. They can recognize what is spam and what is not. So, it’s going to block that content. Chat bots for customer service is another common use case.

Invariably, when you’re calling in, for a customer service issue you’re not talking to a human. It’s either a voice response or it’s a chatbot agent that is servicing your question. So those are some ways that businesses are leveraging AI to do a better job. 47% are harnessing AI tools in the form of digital personal assistants. If you want to go on a vacation today, you can have an AI solution plan out your entire vacation within the budget that you have and match what you like to do as an activity, whether you’re a mountain person or a beach person, and map out all of that for you. So, these are things that individually, we all are benefiting from.

What’s next

So where do we go from here? One of the key concerns people have, and it’s a legitimate concern, is that downsides of AI are going to exceed the potential upside. One of the key areas is becoming redundant and losing jobs. There are going to be some losses of jobs-jobs that are very structured and have a lot of routine, repetitive tasks can be done better by AI than by a human. So, some of those jobs are going to get eliminated.

There’s this concept of hallucination of AI models and bias that gets introduced. Unless the AI model is trained and has context, it’s going to generate results that are not going to be accurate. As an example, how do you differentiate between content that is actual, real content versus content that has been created by AI? What happens if that AI content now becomes part of the content on which AI models are working? That creates all kinds of problems.

There’s a lot of opportunity with the technology, but it’s still early days, and there must be guardrails around it. There are ethical concerns, and there are important security and privacy issues. I’m sure you may have read that Pavlev, who was the founder of Telegram, got arrested in France because the platform, which was meant to be used for good, has now had a lot of illicit activities happening on it- because of that, he has been arrested. An important question is-can you hold the founder of a platform liable for what users use the platform for?

So, these are just some of the things to think about. In conclusion, though these are early days and a lot still needs to be figured out, Generative AI as a key technology has a lot of potential with the need for effective guardrails and safeguards in place. A beginning has been made, but the road ahead is long and winding, with many miles to go before I sleep…

In case of questions, feedback or to schedule a complimentary discussion on how you can leverage GenAI to maximize potential and transform to lead a more balanced, impactful and significant life, please email me at coach@maximizeu.life

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