generative ai is an opportunity for every business
Generative AI is hot right now. It’s a lot like the early days of mobile where every company had to have an app - even if it was useless. Eventually, businesses figured out how to leverage mobile and offered compelling solutions that millions of people use daily.
Right now, every product is getting a chatbot and that isn’t particularly innovative. But that’s okay, early mobile apps were mostly flashlights, websites-in-an-app, and gimmicks like magic 8-balls. Innovation often begins this way: by building the same solutions with new technology. The real breakthroughs happen when we shift focus to solving existing problems in new ways that weren’t previously available.
Mobile and generative AI have one thing in common that makes them platforms for innovation: they revolutionize the way humans interact with machines. Take the iPhone, for example - it made the internet accessible almost everywhere, almost all the time. The possibilities for solving problems when the internet is always in your pocket? Virtually endless.
Generative AI offers a similar leap forward, and there are two major opportunities every business leader should understand:
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Interacting with our devices is surprisingly rudimentary. We communicate with our phones the same way we might with chimpanzees or toddlers - by pointing at pictures and tapping. But now, machines can understand and produce language, images, videos, and sounds. This makes communication far more natural and intuitive for humans, eliminating significant barriers between human and machine.
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We have access to an unimaginable amount of information. But there’s a problem: much of it is low-quality, overly commercialized, or simply too vast to navigate efficiently. Generative AI compresses massive amounts of information and makes searching it faster and more effective.
The next wave of economic winners will be those who effectively apply these two ideas in meaningful ways to their businesses and products.