Written by Brandon Yu I 8 min read
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm, and business leaders must be prepared to harness its full potential. According to a study by Accenture, 73% of companies prioritize AI over all other digital investments, with 90% of business leaders applying AI to tackle aspects of operational resilience. The possibilities of AI are endless, but executives must understand its multifaceted approach and holistic grasp, spanning technical, organizational, regulatory, societal, and philosophical aspects.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio, code, or synthetic data. It is a subfield of artificial intelligence in which computer algorithms are used to generate outputs that resemble human-created content. Generative AI systems use generative models, such as large language models, to statistically sample new data based on the training data set that was fed into the system.
In this article, we’ll share an all you need to know guide on generative AI - and share over 30 startups, resources, and sites to upskill your ability to leverage this new technology. You’ll learn about how to use AI in your personal life (through plug-ins and APIs, for example) and at the workplace (to crunch massive amounts of data or interact with your customers).
Generative AI is not just a promising technology. It’s an entirely new frontier that everyone needs to get ahead of. Simply put, this will dramatically transform the way we work and the way we live. Learning how to interact with and leverage AI will be one of the most essential skills in the coming decade.
Use Cases and Current Examples of Generative AI
ChatGPT has propelled incredible awareness for the Generative AI industry with the fastest growing user-base in history.
ChatGPT reached a million users in 5 days (via Exploding Topics)
But generative AI doesn’t stop there.
AI has an enormous potential to increase your productivity and efficiency, fundamentally changing the way you do your tasks. With the rapid rise in AI, you’ll be able to have time for what matters most to you.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
APIs enable feature development and integration for a wide set of use cases and applications on both the consumer and enterprise levels. These AI APIs are used to build plug-ins that can be integrated into everything, everywhere - bringing on the creation of workflow automations and creative AI ecosystems.
Whether that means using the ChatGPT plugin for Instacart to suggest a culinary adventure and automatically add ingredients to your shopping list, or find the cheapest flights using the ChatGPT plugin for KAYAK giving you discounted flight recommendations – AI is already disrupting the way we eat, host and travel.
Conversational AI
The ChatGPT variety, conversational AI, incorporates natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to translate human conversations into language that AI systems can understand and engage with, and vice versa.
Hence the rapid expansion of chatbots, virtual agents, and voice assistants. With the ability to prompt engineer and train these models to respond in your town of voice, it’s no accident that 65% of Americans surveyed by Pew Research thinks of chatbots as a top 3 AI application. But this is a whole new era of chat bots.
Companies like Binko Chat, which is currently solving intergenerational language barriers by allowing real-time, contextual translation between two different languages, are expanding our ability to communicate internationally and cross-culturally.
MentorGPT learns from the world-renowned Andrew Huberman (Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine) and Paul Graham (Founder of Y Combinator) to give users a conversational opportunity to ask advice, based off of the hours of content produced by these creators and researchers.
Multimodal LLMs (Large Language Models)
LLMs enable computers to understand and process different large data sets of information - video, audio, text - to summarize, predict, and generate new content.
GitHub Copilot, a pioneering coding assistant that uses AI to suggest lines of code, complete chunks of code, and even write new functions, dramatically enhancing productivity and innovation in software development.
DataRobot, an LLM-driven platform that automates and streamlines every step of your data collection process, freeing up time to focus on more strategic tasks and making big data insights accessible for businesses of all sizes.
Replika, an AI-driven personal companion that learns from your interactions to provide tailored conversations, emotional support, and even mindfulness practices, trains on each interaction to improve future conversations.
What AI boosts your workforces’ capabilities and productivity
In the workplace, Generative AI is catching everyone off guard. With new integrations, plugins, and platforms released each day, there is going to be an incredible difference in the way we connect with our customers, partners, and employees in the workplace.
How AI speeds up content generation
In the world of content generation, tools like OpenAI’s GPT-4 can draft promotional emails, write product descriptions, and even generate engaging blog posts. Prompt engineering can help you interface with the AI for a specific tone of voice, similar to what HyperWrite does. Furthermore, Copy.ai is utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms to produce high-quality, engaging, and personalized copy at scale, and tools like Runway ML leverages AI to assist in creating unique visual designs and animations according to your needs.
AI will cut your content production time in half. Designers, content creators, and marketers need to make it a priority to learn how to leverage these tools in existing workflows to keep up with internal expectations.
How AI helps you service your customers at speed
Companies are employing generative AI to enhance customer interactions. For example, Kore.ai’s SmartAssist is an enterprise solution to improve intent recognition when processing customer queries, reducing the time it takes to get the right product or service in front of your valued clients.
Apps like Levity enable businesses to learn and understand, respond to, and prioritize customer feedback - saving your team time from manually sifting through responses. Maybe it’s through AI powered lead generation like Magic - sourcing, qualifying, and sending personalized contacts to your future customers.
AI effectively acts as (at least) an additional employee for your team. The customer-facing and sales teams need to train the AI through prompt engineering to add a degree of personalization and humanization to these automated interactions.
How AI empowers data-driven decisions
AI provides a sophisticated level of data analysis that is beyond human capacity. It can swiftly process and interpret vast amounts of data, offering valuable insights that can drive informed decision-making.
Companies like Hebbia can index anything - from PDFs, to scanned documents, to spreadsheets - and generate an expert search engine using those specific inputs. Seek enables you to ask questions in natural language, and then interacts with your existing datasets to give you the correct response. All without touching any raw data.
Extract more insights that guide your business decisions. We’re predicting one of the largest upticks in demand for data experts who know how to leverage these AI tools.
From automating processes and enhancing decision-making to identifying emerging patterns and minimizing errors, AI is not just a facilitator of efficiency—it's a driver of innovation. By strategically integrating AI into your business operations, you can stay ahead of the curve, adapt to changing market dynamics, and maintain your commitment to delivering exceptional value.
There is a need for AI-fluency at all levels
As you’ve seen, the possibilities are quite endless. But what does that mean to you? How can you use the rise of AI as your unfair advantage?
The answer’s simple: develop AI fluency, both in yourself and your team.
With the growing role of AI in various aspects of business, leaders need to understand AI's basics and how it can benefit their organization. Even for us at Onova, we’re testing AI-fluency in our interview process.
We firmly believe that the future of work means all members of the workforce understand the possibilities of AI and are actively leveraging it to triple their productivity. A lack of AI fluency will not only limit individual career prospects, but also potentially hinder a company's overall progress in the fast-paced, AI-driven economy.
We see AI aggressively disrupting both the way we work and the way we live. In the coming years, and even in the coming months, it will be extremely vital for everyone to develop their AI fluency in order to keep up.
In essence, the integration of AI into business operations signifies a cultural and organizational shift towards a more innovative, data-driven, and collaborative environment. Managed effectively, these changes can propel a business towards higher levels of performance and success.
We recently ran a generative AI hackathon with our client Capgemini, who partnered with Google to host their first-ever global generative AI hackathon. The Capgemini x Google GenAI Hackathon was initiated with a clear mission: to amplify Google Cloud capabilities within Capgemini and its workforce. Capgemini was eager to find a way for their employees to upskill in generative AI. That's when they turned to us, Onova — an innovation consultancy specializing in running hackathons for large Fortune 500 companies.
How to Use AI to your Advantage
How can you leverage AI to become your unfair advantage?
- Stay on top of the trends: stay up to date on the latest AI trends, startups, and APIs. This will give you a macro perspective on where the industry is headed and new ideas on how to best use AI. Newsletters like Ben’s Bites and TLDR AI, or following AI thought leaders like Rowan on Twitter are great places to start.
- Learn through experimentation: with a lot of these AI applications being open access, you can learn through prompt engineering and conversing with AI. You’ll learn more about the capabilities of AI and be inspired to see where you can use AI in your daily and personal life, whether it’s through insight summarizing through Upword or replying to your messages with Rytr.
- Teach to learn: share what you know about AI at your workplace, and use this opportunity to ask questions to AI experts or founders. Use this opportunity to think of more areas to learn new applications of AI and how other people are using it in their daily workflows.
Generative AI is not only changing the landscape of business but is redefining the art of the possible. It's no longer a question of if AI will disrupt your business, but when.
The urgency for AI fluency across all levels of an organization has never been greater - it's a pivotal skillset in today's data-driven world. The power of Generative AI, with its ability to create, innovate, and adapt, offers limitless possibilities. From designing new products to writing code, it's reshaping the creative process.
So, it's time to embrace this technological marvel, upskill for AI fluency, and unlock the potential of Generative AI. In doing so, we don't just keep pace with the changing business landscape; we actively shape it for a future filled with untapped opportunities.
At Onova, we’re committed to assisting organizations of all sizes in leveraging AI for their business. Our approach involves identifying relevant AI use cases tailored to your needs, generating hundreds of prototypes via Generative AI Hackathons, and facilitating the implementation of these prototypes with the help of our dedicated AI development squads.
We’ve recently partnered with one of the leading generative AI companies, Copy.ai. They have created a revolutionary Text-to-Workflow product that allows business users to describe a workflow in natural language and have it instantly be built. Through our collaboration, we’re offering Text-to-Workflow for free to thousands of participants in our Generative AI Hackathons.
We’re also experimenting on our own and have launched several AI products, including an AI-based poker coach in just 3 days. We’re bullish on the rise of AI, and we’re ready to help you leverage and capitalize on this exciting innovation.
