From Hype to Productivity: How AI is Transforming Business in 2024
By any measure, Generative AI was THE technology story of 2023. Sparked by the Microsoft-OpenAI Chat GPT announcement in late 2022, nearly every day brought a new story about Generative AI and new speculation on how it could transform nearly every facet of commerce and society.
Business leaders scrambled to figure out how to embrace Generative AI, and whether the risks and challenges outweighed the potential benefits.
The power to create new content – written text, images, even video – is extraordinary. But along with the excitement came lots of questions, experimentation, and mixed results. The industry grappled with 'AI hallucinations,' where AI systems sometimes fabricated information or delivered inappropriate responses. This brought to light the need for precision, reliability, and control, especially in AI for mission-critical applications.
2024: The Year of Practical AI Use in Enterprise Settings
As we step into 2024, the narrative is changing. Analysts are predicting a shift from the promise of AI to tangible productivity. The focus is now on deploying AI in ways that are responsible, trustworthy, and significantly beneficial for businesses.
As Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab recently stated:
"I expect mass adoption by companies that will start delivering some of the productivity benefits that we've been hoping for for a long time. It's going to affect knowledge workers, people who have been largely spared by a lot of the computer revolution in the past 30 years. Creative workers, lawyers, finance professors and more are going to see their jobs change quite a bit this year. If we embrace it, it should be making our jobs better and allow us to do new things we couldn't have done before. Rarely will it completely automate any job — it's mostly going to be augmenting and extending what we can do."
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- Erik Brynjolfsson, cited in Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, December 8, 2023.
Key Considerations for Embracing AI in Your Business
The move towards mass adoption doesn’t mean all of the issues with Generative AI have gone away; It just means that AI solutions are maturing, and we're accumulating experience and insights that enable companies to make AI solutions part of their core business operations with greater confidence, control, and results.
As you consider joining others in adopting an enterprise AI solution for your business, it’s important to consider some basic questions:
- Prudent AI Strategy: Out of all the AI options you are considering, where is a risk-free place to start? What are some initial projects that could offer a clear payoff with a relatively low cost of entry or process adjustment?
- Safety, security: How will a given AI solution protect your data? How can you ensure that an AI solution does not inadvertently expose your data or enable outside threats?
- Transparency, trust, data sources: What information was used to train the AI solutions you are considering? Will generated results be documented and confirmable? What is the source for any generated results? Is it legitimate, or could it contain opaque problems?
- Accuracy: How do the AI solutions you are considering perform against real-life benchmarks?
- Time, cost: For any AI solution, how much effort, delay, and cost are involved to achieve desired requirements?
- Model training: How much of the work is “duplication” vs “amplification”? Put another way, are the AI solutions you are considering just replicating work that humans already do quite well versus saving people time?
- Use and purpose of data: What will you do with the new data generated by an AI solution? How will the content be used, applied, organized, connected, and evaluated?
- Compliance: The AI regulatory landscape is projected to change rapidly over the next 12-24 months. How can you stay ahead of new regulatory changes?
- Expertise: What are the skills required of your team to fully execute?
- Personnel impact: Who is affected, and how? For the AI solution you are considering, will it result in more work for certain people and teams and less work for others?
- Change, evolution: What happens as this technology is rapidly evolving?
Docugami: A Case Study in Practical, Trustworthy AI Application
How do these considerations translate into real-world AI applications? Let's take Docugami as an example. Unlike the big broad-based AI models that have been trained on the entire Internet (with all the risks and extraneous inputs that the Internet entails), Docugami is Generative AI designed specifically for business contexts.
Docugami is Trustworthy AI, built with customer security, data privacy, and human control baked in from the start. Its proprietary AI models are trained exclusively on business content, for business scenarios. And you can always trust the results generated by Docugami, because they are generated exclusively from your own unique data.
This approach highlights how AI – when thoughtfully applied – can move from AI hype to a practical tool enhancing business productivity.
Taking the Next Step in AI Adoption
2024 marks a pivotal year in realizing AI's true potential in the business world. For businesses considering AI integration, it's an exciting time to explore how solutions like Docugami can align with your specific business needs without compromising on security or control.
If you're contemplating how AI can fit into your business strategy, consider booking a demo or setting up a consultation to discuss how your business can start harnessing generative AI in a way that's tailored to your unique challenges and goals.