Generative Al falling short of promise to transform businesses

Enterprises underestimated what they needed, and overrated its business impact: Observers

- Krist Boo Senior Business Correspondent

Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) promised a roaring business revolution, but 18 months after ChatGPT's big-bang debut, its impact is more like a whimper.

Enterprises had underestimated what they needed to use gen AI and overrated its impact on businesses, observers said.

Consultancy firm McKinsey, which in July 2023 projected gen AI to add a US$4.4 trillion (S$5.9 trillion) bump to global corporate profits annually, said in April that adoption among corporations has not gone far beyond gen AI pilots and a few use cases or situations in which the technology could be used.

Ms Gayatri Shenai, a senior partner at the firm, said in a webinar: "The value really comes from enterprise-wide adoption and scale.

And here, most organisations are struggling." The hubris following ChatGPT'debut in November 2022 might explain a few let-downs.

Some of the test projects that firms picked in 2023 were not scalable like launching gen AI for a function performed by eight people- and would not have delivered value, said Mr Matthew Candy, IBM Consulting's global managing partner for gen Al.

"There was pressure, questions being asked from above, and lots of people were feeling like they've got to do something, show something," he said.

Results of a poll of 300 executives by the MIT Technology Review Insights for Telstra International in late 2023 found that first adopters of gen AI reported lower confidence in their firm's technology than others.

Commenting on the findings, MIT Sloan School research fellow Michael Schrage said: "It is disappointing how tactical that experimentation has been. Too many experts look at gen AI as a way of automating or augmenting existing workflows and processes, rather than rethinking use case fundamentals or the desired outputs and outcomes they really want." Hallucination the inclination of gen AI to fabricate stuff based on probability is a major obstacle.