Organizations can immediately benefit from this technology if leaders combine two approaches: the breadth approach, which involves understanding the impact of generative AI on the company, and the depth approach, which aims to solve specific business problems.
The world was amazed by the emergence of generative AI (GenAI) and its ability to create content, including creative images or texts that seem to have been written by a human. This technology represents a paradigm change that could significantly impact businesses. Companies must be ready to embrace the opportunities ahead: strategic planning, investment, training, and critical thinking are key elements to incorporate this innovation effectively.
Leaders who want to join this journey and generate value should adopt two combined approaches: "breadth" and "depth." Both should be implemented early in the GenAI journey and side-by-side, as they are equally important, although each will require different approaches and deliver different results.
Breadth: Understanding the Potential
Both should be implemented early in the GenAI journey and side-by-side, as they are equally important, although each will require different approaches and deliver different results. For this, a broad understanding of the technology and its applications is needed, including literacy on this topic throughout the organization: educating all employees about the capabilities, limitations, and implications of this technology and, above all, promoting solutions like Microsoft CoPilot.
On the other hand, it is necessary to establish regulatory compliance mechanisms. It is essential to create an AI ethics committee to develop guidelines, precise guides, and standards aligned with the principles of the company and the evolution of the regulatory scenario to ensure its responsible use, protect data privacy, and avoid biased results.
This "breadth" strategy will only be possible through tools incorporating a new concept already well-known in the market: AI is part of our work teams. This concept involves taking AI as another member of our teams that will "filter" into all future tasks, materializing in everyday productivity tools, such as emails, presentations, spreadsheets, electronic analysis, reports, and others. An increasing number of operations and processes will become automated by GenIA and its "co-pilots."
Depth: Accelerating Specific Implementations
The "depth" strategy, applied simultaneously, accelerates the implementation of GenAI solutions to address specific business problems. This pillar requires in-depth knowledge of specific areas and topics and a technological infrastructure to build these solutions.
Companies need skilled GenAI expert teams with experienced AI specialists, data scientists, and machine learning engineers who can successfully navigate the complexities of GenAI, drive innovation and ensure solution excellence.
While GenAI reduces reliance on historical training databases, it continues to require large amounts of data like traditional (non-generative) AI projects.
Therefore, companies must ensure that their data is sanitized, secured, and accessible and that the computing infrastructure is robust, capable of supporting high-performance computing, and scalable to support future technology growth, something that has ceased to be an issue since the advent of the cloud.
Another challenge is stimulating imagination in all business areas and requiring them to invest time in understanding how GenAI can transform their processes to optimize customer service, become more efficient and productive, improve employee experience, or any other potential use case.
The first step into this process can be workshops designed for creating, developing, and validating ideas: workspaces in which multidisciplinary teams, with technology and business experts, can explore the potential value of GenAI. The next step is to advance with agile and incremental implementations: a pilot testing, evaluation, and iteration cycle to understand GenAI's effects, benefits, and challenges in the real world. Regular evaluation of these initiatives, based on employee and customer feedback, allows continuous improvement and fine-tuning of the strategies.
Conclusion
In a nutshell: the future is now. GenAI can transform business while challenging companies to address it quickly and strategically.
Adopting the dual-axis strategy of "breadth" and "depth" helps organizations balance broad understanding and widespread use of GenAI and solutions with deep technical knowledge. Both are necessary to maximize the potential of this technology. Companies that can quickly advance in this journey will be better positioned to navigate and lead in this emerging scenario.