AI’s untapped potential
gettyIn the business world, artificial intelligence is being leveraged as a tool to cut costs, increase efficiency and responsiveness. But it can, and will, go a lot farther than that, spurring imaginative new approaches to opportunities and problems.
“Products and services that were previously just out of reach have been made more accessible by the multiplicative capabilities of AI," says Dr. Richard Bownes, principal at Kin + Carta. "What was seen as not possible before, is now becoming a reality.”
Think back to the year 2000. Who could have foreseen social media shopping or cryptocurrency?
It comes down to thinking of ways to bring disparate concepts together to deliver new way of solving problems. Consider the art and science of conducting surveys — which originally relied on collecting data through phone banks or mailed questionnaires, which both then required a lot of back-end data entry and tabulation. Thanks to the opening of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, both consumers and businesspeople had a front-end interface — the browser — through which they could participate in surveys, adding a new channel for researchers and marketers to understand trends.
One company that emerged to deliver on this new survey paradigm is SurveyMonkey, a research tools provider founded in 1999. The technology wave of the time made innovators such as SurveyMonkey possible. Will AI have the same energizing effect on new companies or services as we head into the mid to late 2020s? Will today’s tech wave begin to unveil new solutions to old problems?
Let’s ask SurveyMonkey what they see ahead. With AI, the sky’s the limit, and we’re only just starting to discover what new ways of doing things are possible, says Jing Huang, senior director of engineering and machine learning at SurveyMonkey. While "presently, the most notable impact of AI is observed in the enhancement, optimization, and streamlining of existing business domains," this will open up, she predicts.
The potential applications that will arise through AI “are vast and can potentially transform various industries—from healthcare and education to finance and retail," says Huang. AI-driven applications such as ChatGPT or AI Copilot "are redefining user access to information, enabling a more efficient and intuitive experience in place of traditional methods such as web searching. The advance of multi-modal AI models has created a new paradigm of opportunities for businesses around context generation and retrieval."
It means there will be new and far more intuitive ways of dealing with computers. With recent AI progress in large language models, "in addition to voice and video generation, we will likely see new businesses, focused on providing more natural and human-centric interactions between humans and machines, sprouting up," Huang predicts.
Business leaders across the spectrum recognize that we are only starting to recognize what AI — fused with other concepts — can deliver. “AI can act as a powerful tool for serendipity, connecting disparate information and fostering unexpected discoveries,” says Bownes. “Through predictive analytics and recommendation systems, AI guides researchers and entrepreneurs toward novel ideas and solutions through unstructured data queries. It can also free up time for higher-order thinking and value generation through automation and process streamlining."
AI helps accelerate innovation "through reducing tedium, surfacing new knowledge, and highlighting trends and patterns to scaffold the innovation process illuminating what works, and diminishing what doesn’t,” Bownes says.
Still, as it’s early in the game, we won’t immediately have a grasp on AI’s impact on innovation for some time to come. “We do not have the proper tools to assess its full impact on the global macro-economic environment," says Derek Kane, head of advanced analytics for GEA Group. "AI will boost new business opportunities, and they are happening right now as we speak.”
For example, Kane continues, “the multimodal capabilities of technology like OpenAI’s GPT4V, GPT4Turbo, and Google Gemini will allow for entirely new applications and industries that bridge data-driven applications between the image, sound, video, and text landscape. Imagine taking a photo or video and being able to transform or execute this data into computer code, reports, analytics, actionable items, music, and art. That’s the level we will be dealing with in 2024."
A development in the AI field today that Huang sees as revolutionary for innovation are personal AI assistants. "It’s not just a tool, it’s a 24×7 partner, aiding everything from initial idea generation to managing your packed schedule," Huang says. "AI’s real power lies in its vast repository of data and knowledge, enriching brainstorming sessions in ways that were previously beyond reach."
Entrepreneurs and established business leaders across the business spectrum concur that AI has the potential to spur new ideas never before considered.
At the same time, because things are moving so fast, Kane offers words of caution. ‘The emerging AI space is the wild west of the digital kingdom," he says. The initial AI breakthrough — ChatGPT — evolved rapidly into something far superior in a mere 12 months. The risk is “choosing the wrong business problem to solve. It’s not wise to expend too much energy in mastering the current generation AI capabilities. Be careful, think ahead and never behind with AI.”
Ultimately, innovation is a very human process, and while AI can boost knowledge and experimentation, it takes humans to turn innovation into reality. “While AI excels in enhancing and optimizing existing processes, it is not yet adept at producing fundamentally new, groundbreaking ideas,” says Huang. “Such innovation still relies heavily on human insight and creativity.”
AI today “has notable limitations including lack of contextual understanding, hallucination, bias, and ethical concerns,” she continues. “Therefore, while leveraging AI for streamlining operations and enhancing productivity is advisable, overreliance on it for generating innovative ideas may lead to outputs that are either derivative or of limited novelty.”
The true essence of innovation, “especially in creating concepts that have never been seen or conceived before, remains a uniquely human attribute,” Huang adds. “Looking ahead, the evolving capabilities of AI present both potential and uncertainties. It is essential to maintain a balanced perspective, recognizing AI’s current strengths in processing and implementation, while also valuing the irreplaceable role of human ingenuity in driving genuine innovation.”
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{URL}https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2024/01/28/we-have-only-begun-to-scratch-the-surface-of-ais-true-innovative-power/{/URL}
{Author}Joe McKendrick, Senior Contributor{/Author}
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