At work as well as in your personal life, you’ve almost certainly been bombarded with talk about generative artificial intelligence (AI). It’s all over the mainstream media, in trade journals, in C-suite conversations, and on the front lines of whatever work your organization does. There’s no escaping it.
The stories make AI sound so miraculous that, in fact, you could be forgiven for thinking it must be a bunch of hype. But the reality is, generative AI can truly be transformational for businesses. You can leave it for textbooks to fill in the details about what AI is and how it works. But in a nutshell, AI relies on building large language models (LLM) with the help of machine learning (ML). AI trains on vast amounts of data, immerses itself, and learns from the data in ways not unlike how humans learn (but a whole lot faster, and ingesting far, far more data).
Notice that the title of this article refers to generative AI. This AI doesn’t just make recommendations — it actually creates new data or content, or generates insights by using the power of natural language processing (NLP) and ML.
Tackling many tasks
What can generative AI really do for your business? What business problems can it solve? For starters, it’s a fantastic headache remedy. Some of the business headaches generative can cure include- Production bottlenecks: Got processes that are stuck and unable to keep up with the demands of customers? Generative AI breaks through bottlenecks by automating processes, improving efficiency, facilitating faster and better human decisions, increasing output, maximizing resources, and speeding up development cycles.
- Tedious tasks: Generative AI can tackle mundane and tedious tasks, freeing up human brainpower for real value-creating initiatives that your people will find more fulfilling.
- Inconsistencies and noncompliance: Generative AI creates consistency across your organization’s communications and enforces compliance with internal and external standards. It’s easy for discrepancies and errors to pop up and multiply — generative AI can identify these issues, offer insights and recommendations, and even automatically fix them.
- Training hurdles: Generative AI helps new hires onboard and get up-to-speed quickly by generating training materials and job simulations. Personalized instruction can fill knowledge gaps.
- Customer-service struggles: When equipped with information-retrieval solutions, the technology can answer questions quickly and can even handle some customer interactions entirely on its own. It also improves live human interactions by empowering agents and creating instant conversation summaries.
Exploring the use cases
What generative AI can do for your organization boils down to three primary areas:- Creating: This is what it sounds like — using AI to come up with something new. It also may mean editing or revising something that has already been created, by a person or AI, perhaps by turning it into a different format. For your marketing team, a generative AI tool can write the first draft of an ebook about a new product, or create a press release or search engine optimization (SEO)-ready web content. It can come up with a knowledge base article on the latest product feature to help the support team, or a best-practices management article for learning and development. It can help the human resources (HR) team write a job description, making sure it’s doing so in inclusive language. The product development team will love how it ingests and crunches a list of features and bug tickets to come up with release notes.
- Analyzing: This means taking an in-depth look at content of some kind and generating insights. Generative AI can spot trends or reach conclusions of some sort, perhaps even analyze sentiment amid a batch of customer feedback. Marketing may ask the AI platform to process a webinar recording and summarize the key takeaways. The support team can have it scour customer support survey responses to come up with insights on areas of improvement to consider. Generative AI can help learning and development conjure up some FAQs by analyzing and categorizing what’s in an internal wiki. AI can listen to a recording of a job interview and create a summary for a recruiter. Product developers can have it study customer feedback to find insights for what new features to prioritize.
- Governing: The govern use case includes a focus on compliance, looking for language that runs afoul of legal and regulatory rules. It finds incorrect terminology and statements and works to prevent data loss and global compliance problems. This type of AI work also means checking for factual accuracy, detecting claims that are wrong and suggesting replacement wording. Marketers can use it to find errors and violations in advertising copy, and for HR, AI can flag non-inclusive language in employee communications, then make suggested revisions. The learning and development team may use it to ensure training materials are compliant with industry certification requirements and other vital standards.
Making it happen
Many generative AI tools are out there right now, and they’re ready for the masses. Countless people subscribe to platforms such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and Meta AI is now built right into social media platforms.For the use cases outlined in the preceding section, though, it’s essential to seek an enterprise-grade, full-stack generative AI platform rather than a consumer-targeted AI assistant. Your organization will want a platform that can be truly customized to your needs and integrated with your operations, trained on accurate data that’s relevant to your business and industry, and fully in line with your security and compliance requirements.
So, do it yourself? That’s not such a great plan, either. Building your own AI stack can be slow and expensive. Look for a partner that can abstract the complexity so you can benefit from the AI-first workflows, not get bogged down building and maintaining infrastructure.
When picking a platform, follow these tips:
- Keep pace with your organizational needs. Get a tool that can deploy custom AI apps in a snap for any use case, including digital assistants, content generation, summarization, and data analysis.
- Seek the right model. Palmyra LLMs from Writer, for example, are top-ranked on key benchmarks for model performance set by Stanford’s Holistic Evaluation of Language Models.
- Connect to your company knowledge. An LLM alone can’t deliver accurate answers about information that’s locked inside your business knowledge bases. For that, you need retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which is basically a way to feed an LLM-based AI app company-specific information that can’t be found in its training data. Check out writer.com/product/graph-based-rag for more information.
- Be sure it’s fully customizable. You need consistent, high-quality outputs that meet your organization’s specific requirements, and a general consumer tool can’t do that. You also must have AI guardrails that enforce all your rules and standards.
- Integrate the tool. To fit into your flow, AI apps need to be in your people’s hands however they’re working. You need an enterprise application programming interface (API) and extensions that’ll build tools right into Microsoft Word and Outlook, Google Docs and Chrome, Figma, Contentful, or whatever else your people love to use.
- Deploy it your way. Look for options that include single-tenant or multi-tenant deployments.
- Get things done quickly. Look for a platform that can have you up and running in days, not months. Wouldn’t you rather spend your time adopting than tediously building?
- Keep it secure. Here’s an incredibly vital area where consumer tools can leave your enterprise at great risk. You need an LLM that’s secure, auditable, and never uses your sensitive data in model training. You’ll lose a lot of sleep if your tool doesn’t comply with the standards your organization must follow, whether that means SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, or CCPA. Find a tool that manages access with single-sign on (SSO), multifactor authentication, and role-based permissions.
