Don Schuerman, CTO and Vice President Marketing and Technology Strategy, Pegasystems.
The capabilities of generative AI technology continue to astound us. Each day brings new breakthroughs that push the boundaries of what was once thought impossible. I’m still amazed every time I watch the OpenAI Sora video generated from the simple prompt of “Historical footage of California during the gold rush.”
But while these achievements are truly extraordinary, I wonder if enterprises are fully tapping into the transformative power of this transformative technology.
The use cases we’re seeing for generative AI are primarily around streamlining routine tasks like content creation, summarization and code generation. While these advancements are incredibly useful, these productivity hacks will be considered table stakes in short order. They’ll be baked into nearly every application, providing a competitive advantage for neither the user nor the vendors that provide them.
What If We Dared To Think Bigger?
Instead of focusing on incremental enhancements, what if we start thinking of ways to tap into generative AI to reimagine the core of our business operations?
By combining our drive for innovation with generative AI, we have the potential to revolutionize how businesses work from top to bottom—enhancing efficiency, speed and customer experiences. This approach could catalyze legacy transformation in ways previously unimagined.
Generative AI has the power to inspire all new ways of doing business:
• It can aid in product development by identifying market gaps, refining concepts and incorporating user feedback.
• It can redesign workflows by integrating industry best practices to optimize operations.
• It can craft targeted sales tactics by analyzing trends and behaviors to drive growth and capitalize on opportunities.
• It can enhance customer service by giving every customer and every agent the power to address issues instantly.
These approaches go beyond productivity hacks—they power the heart of what makes a business run. Instant content summarization looks trivial by comparison.
Now, if I were starting a new business today, it would be a no-brainer to try to leverage generative AI in this way. But for more established companies, it may seem more challenging. Seasoned organizations are saddled with complex legacy systems, making them more vulnerable to agile startups. It’s always difficult to introduce radically new ways of doing business that disrupt decades of ingrained thinking.
But perhaps, generative AI is a great way to help old businesses shake things up. It’s “design thinking” without requiring an army of consultants. By unleashing generative AI on their business operations, leaders can unbiasedly analyze how they operate and shine a light on all the unnecessarily complex processes and outdated thinking that have long been accepted and tolerated. Gen AI can help them reimagine new ways to operate that will put them in a better, more agile position to compete and adjust to new market demands.
This innovative approach could breathe new life into aging enterprises by streamlining operations more efficiently and cost-effectively than traditional consulting methods.
Applied in this way, it’s not just generative AI—this is transformational AI. It goes beyond accelerating productivity; it accelerates innovation by sparking new business strategies and revamping existing operations, paving the way for a new era of autonomous enterprise.
Keep in mind that not all Large Language Models (LLMs) can be tailored for genuine business innovation. Most models are generalists that are trained on public information found on the internet and are not experts on your particular brand of doing business. However, techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) allow for the augmentation of general LLMs with industry-specific and company-specific data, enabling them to adapt to anyone’s requirements without extensive and expensive training.
We are still in the nascent stages of advanced AI adoption. Most companies are grappling with the basics—such as implementation, security and governance. However, forward-thinking organizations are already looking ahead. By reimagining the application of generative AI, they are laying the groundwork for businesses to reinvent themselves, ushering in an era where innovation knows no bounds.
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