Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a necessity for businesses of all kinds to remain competitive. As its potential continues to unfold, it becomes more apparent how this technology will reshape the business landscape.
Leveraging technologies like AI can enable swift decision-making, enhance customer service offerings, transform small businesses and large, and provide a competitive edge across industries. Today, we’re already seeing the beginning of the future of AI and its impact on business.
What kinds of AI will build the future of business?
Most of us interact with artificial intelligence on a daily basis, perhaps without even realizing it. Voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri all rely on AI and natural language processing to understand what we say and respond to our commands. When you contact a company, your first interaction might be with an AI customer service chatbot rather than a real person. And then there are the latest viral AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E that can create pretty much any text and images you want within seconds.
These tools are based on a particular form of AI known as generative artificial intelligence (gen AI). Gen AI uses machine learning to mine vast amounts of data and train algorithms to generate content that’s almost indistinguishable from what humans can make. Such are the capabilities of generative AI that it’s being touted as one of the most powerful and transformative technologies that humans have ever had access to. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that the impact of AI could be “more profound than fire or electricity.”
Generative AI isn’t the only kind, though. Today, companies can leverage the power and potential of non-generative AI tools — called analytic and discriminative AI — like the ones that streamline business operations or identify bottlenecks and blockers for processes in manufacturing, mining and many other industries. But the most impactful AI might just be the combination of these two types of AI, leveraging the possibilities that generative AI has to offer with the unlimited opportunities of analytic, back-end AI.
How is AI used in business?
Given that the best path forward will integrate multiple forms of AI, there are many ways for businesses to harness the technology and succeed. However, as companies figure out how to use the power of AI to their advantage, they must also navigate a wide array of challenges related to strategy, architecture and governance, especially as they look to transition to wider scale deployment. One Deloitte study highlighted building trust as one of the most critical obstacles to scaling AI in business usage. In other areas, concerns over AI bias and hallucinations also appear tricky to solve.
Mitigating risks like these, though, is possible. Using a Large Language Model (LLM) that’s trained solely on a business’s proprietary information, for example, would alleviate some of the risks associated with using public LLMs, which can contain biased, copyrighted or even offensive data and language. In the summer of 2024, Dassault Systèmes and Mistral AI announced a partnership that seeks to resolve this issue. The two will offer LLMs as a Service (LLMaS), which businesses can use with their own proprietary information, and take advantage of more secure deployment options such as OUTSCALE’s sovereign cloud architecture.
This fully sovereign AI stack is aimed at organizations in highly regulated industries, from financial services to healthcare and defense. It allows them to use Mistral AI’s commercial models knowing that their data is processed and stored within specific geographic boundaries and complies with all local regulations.
These types of solutions continue to gain traction as businesses seek out trusted tools from which they can benefit both from scientific modeling, simulation and AI as well as high security and compliance standards.
The role of AI: Job killer or creator?
Today, we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of what generative AI can really do. This means that most businesses are still in the early stages of figuring out how to use the technology within their own organization.
Contrary to popular belief, AI – and particularly generative AI – isn’t expected to cut jobs, but in fact increase headcounts for organizations. Companies are on the lookout for talent with AI and data management expertise to help them develop and refine their strategies.
Longer term, businesses will increasingly focus on upskilling and reskilling their workforce to capture the full value of gen AI and, hopefully, future proof their workers in the process. Jobs will certainly change. Some will be replaced by AI. Routine, repetitive tasks and basic administrative, data entry and analytics roles will likely be affected.
Yet we’ll also see the creation of new roles that were previously unimaginable. Skills that make people uniquely human will become more valuable, particularly critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and empathy. And people in already highly skilled jobs will be freed up to work even more productively as gen AI and data science help them to unlock the true value of data and support fast, effective decision-making.
How are companies using AI today?
In some industries, job creation and AI adoption are on the rise already, with the technology quickly weaving its way into companies and entire sectors.
A McKinsey report on the subject found that generative AI adoption in particular is taking off in the professional services industry, which includes fields like consulting, tax preparation, human resources and more. AI in business is predominantly used for marketing and sales and in product and service development, and their investments in the technology are already paying off, boosting revenues in supply chain and inventory management by more than 5%.
AI is also having a widespread influence on other industries, including:
Financial services: From fraud detection and security breach prevention to investment algorithms and seamless back-office workflows, technologies like AI bring a host of benefits to financial services institutions. One key area gaining traction is in the way banks use gen AI to interact with their customers and carry out previously time intensive tasks like due diligence. McKinsey estimated that gen AI could add between US$200 billion and US$340 billion in value annually to the global banking sector, largely through increased productivity.
Healthcare: AI has a critical role to play in helping to diagnose illnesses, deliver preventative treatment and revolutionize the discovery of new drugs, vaccines and cures. It will enhance clinical decision-making and become an integral part of the shift to personalized healthcare. In the shorter term, with human oversight, gen AI could prove invaluable for helping to relieve the administrative burden on medical professionals such as by synthesizing clinical notes, generating discharge summaries and more.
Manufacturing: The future of manufacturing will be largely impacted by AI. In the same way that robots and automated systems have already had a transformational effect on the shop floor, operating production lines around the clock, so too is AI making its mark. Manufacturers are already using AI to streamline business operations and processes, building optimized constraint-based schedules to increase output and resource use and adapt quickly to supply chain fluctuations.
The future of the artificial intelligence business
Industry onlookers like PwC expect the hype around generative AI in business to become a reality as we see companies move from proof of concepts to wider scale deployment in real-world applications.
“There has been a lot of excitement around gen AI, but it’s about to get a whole lot more exciting for organizations able to deliver benefits such as hyper-personalization at scale, enabling exceptional customer experiences, supporting the design and delivery of greater products and services and augmenting the workforce in incredible ways,” Joey Jegerajan, CTO of Consulting at PwC UK and EMEA, told Financial Times.
In the same vein, the next generation of LLMs will elevate generative AI beyond simple chatbots and virtual assistants. These engines will be able to reason, plan and retain information, allowing them to deal with more complex questions and tasks, and lessen the chances of making basic mistakes. Ultimately, industry leaders believe that even though this type of AI will change the way we’re going to work, it should serve as a tool that brings new abstract capabilities, delivering productivity gains, societal benefits and reasoning capacity to nearly all verticals.
Rebecca Lambert is a skilled content creator and journalist based in the UK. Since she was a young girl, Rebecca has been captivating readers with her words, covering virtually any and every subject matter.