McKinsey: Will Generative AI Change Your Business?

Generative AI is beginning to gain a foothold in public consciousness. From social media users leveraging apps to generate artistically-enhanced profile photos to McKinsey & Company researchers using tools like ChatGPT to generate written articles, tools that were once solely in the hands of researchers are becoming more readily available, and stand to drive significant change in the way businesses interact with their employees, customers, and the public.

“The rise of generative AI has the potential to be a major game-changer for businesses. This technology, which allows for the creation of original content by learning from existing data, has the power to revolutionize industries and transform the way companies operate” said ChatGPT, a generative AI technology, when prompted by McKinsey researchers for an opening paragraph about how transformative generative AI will be for business. “By enabling the automation of many tasks that were previously done by humans, generative AI has the potential to increase efficiency and productivity, reduce costs, and open up new opportunities for growth.”

The above paragraph, while not perfect, is an effective demonstration of the power of generative AI tools and how they can be adapted to automate mundane, repetitive business processes and free human workers to focus on more challenging work. There are a wide variety of business use cases for generative AI: sales and marketing professionals can create royalty-free stock images and targeted and engaging cross-channel content at scale, operations teams can provide personalized customer interactions that resolve the most common questions, legal teams can draft and review legal documents, and business leaders can make more informed and data-driven decisions by using AI to sift through large sets of data.

The technology is not without its flaws, however: the current iteration of ChatGPT cannot detect when it generates content that is factually incorrect, intellectual property law and business ethics have not yet caught up to the new tech, and since AI “learns” from pre-existing content, systemic biases in the base content itself could be propagated in its output. Companies will also have to fine tune the tools to reflect their own norms and values.

Overall, ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies have the potential to significantly transform the way businesses operate. From improving customer service and content creation to assisting in data analysis and decision-making, generative AI has the ability to significantly streamline and optimize business processes. Companies looking to drive growth and success should stay up to date on the latest developments in generative AI technology and invest in evaluating, adapting, and implementing it to serve their own unique needs.