ChatGPT And Generative AI: What This Technology Means For Today’s CIO
AI is becoming an essential tool for businesses to drive growth, improve efficiencies and stay competitive. I didn’t write that—ChatGPT, the now well-known chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022, did.
Seemingly overnight, this revolutionary technology has dropped millions of jaws by auto-assembling volumes of structurally sound sentences and fully functional lines of code. It’s become such a hot topic that even the Kardashians must be getting jealous. The spotlight is well-deserved. I believe generative AI will bring massive changes in how companies run their business, the technology solutions they need to compete and the skill sets required of their employees.
Why all the excitement? It starts with an understanding that ChatGPT is different from the AI of the past few years, with more advanced natural language processing abilities and a more robust capacity to learn from prompts and fine-tuning. And it’s getting so good, so fast, that if businesses aren’t yet considering it a vital component for growth, they will need to very soon—or risk being left behind by their competition.
As businesses adopt and adapt, forward-thinking technology leaders and CIOs will face new questions and challenges to prepare their technology stacks, platforms and organizations to take advantage of this unprecedented technology wave. Here’s what they should keep in mind.
• What To Do First: Multiple use cases come to mind when considering this technology, from simple help-desk bots to larger solutions that replace entire outbound sales teams. How do tech leaders prioritize potential implementations? As with any technology assessment, it starts with understanding your business capabilities and processes. Focus on processes that can be optimized with AI and ML, then estimate what business value these improvements could drive. Categorizing projects as low, medium or high impact and determining their ROI will help you set priorities.
• Buy Or Build: With all the excitement around ChatGPT, seemingly every vendor on the planet has started touting “AI capabilities.” As teams evaluate these vendors and their solutions, it will be imperative to understand which solutions are truly leveraging this new generative AI capability and which are just jumping on the AI bandwagon. A deep dive into the underlying technology driving the solution’s AI component will be critical.
Alternatively, teams may decide they want to forgo buying and instead build their solution in-house. First, however, they’ll have to assess the specific infrastructure needed, navigate commercial licensing and resource the team correctly to train the models (among other steps).
• Making It Yours: Not only is AI useless without data, but it’s just as useless with the wrong data. Ensuring that the solution gets the right inputs will depend on each company’s needs, of course, but every business will need the right architecture, data model, resources, prompts and training. Only then can organizations feel confident that they’re effectively harnessing the power of this technology.
• Impact On Talent: Let’s face it: Generative AI will replace some jobs. So what happens to the people performing those jobs today? It’s a valid concern—one that reminds me of the discussions among infrastructure teams when the cloud was the hot topic a decade or so ago. I would imagine that we’ll see a similar fundamental shift over time in all types of roles and functions, from call center agents to engineers. We can also expect an increased focus on new roles in core functions, such as prompt engineers on data teams that will be required to fine-tune models. While needs will vary by company, it’s clear that staffing changes will have to happen.
• Privacy And Security: As with any new technology, opinions abound on how generative AI will be regulated, as well as its impact on an individual’s data privacy and security. Copyright protections and disinformation are just two of the challenges we’ve seen out of the gate, and that number will certainly grow, leading inevitably to regulations (which the EU and U.K. governments are already considering). The fact remains, though, that technology always moves faster than governing bodies, so where we will land remains to be seen.
When it comes to generative AI, CIOs face big decisions with enormous consequences. Ultimately, the goal should be to drive business value while also maintaining trust—trust that the CIO has the knowledge and foresight to help keep their company ahead of the competition in a thoughtful and governed manner.
Generative AI is exciting and scary at the same time. Sitting on the sidelines and waiting for everything to get figured out is tempting, but it’s also risky. That’s why, as technology leaders, we need to get out of our comfort zones, gain awareness, get educated and work closely with our business partners to drive a thoughtful approach to embrace this game-changer in our own organizations.
