Disruption managed: bringing “gen AI-in-the-room”

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the landscape of the business world. At Capgemini, we are bringing “Gen AI-in-the-room” by letting our clients experience generative AI firsthand, as in-room advisors, and AI assistants through an eye-opening workshop that helps our clients rethink, reimagine, and reshape their business strategies.

Generative AI is the new blue with massive potential

As one of the hottest technological innovations in the marketplace today, generative AI has become the dinner-table topic of dystopian futures or the future savior of collegiate essay writers. What may be true is that generative AI is the future of business. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we work by automating tasks that were once thought impossible for machines to do. This technology is capable of creating content, developing strategies, and even making decisions. With generative AI, businesses can streamline their operations and optimize their workflows, making them more efficient and effective.

Through many of our AI-powered innovation sessions, we are redefining how our clients ideate, capture, share, analyze, and innovate using generative AI. Within these sessions we are actively experimenting with our clients around removing traditional constraints and barriers on how work gets done, accelerating analysis, insights, and applied learnings that have restricted rapid decision making and strategic-to-tactical execution.

What is generative AI?

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the landscape of the business world, and its impact is already being felt. This advanced technology has the potential to revolutionize the way work is performed in a business environment. From automating mundane tasks to enhancing creativity, generative AI can streamline operations, improve productivity, and create new opportunities for growth.

Generative AI uses deep-learning algorithms and LLMs to create new data that can be used to train other machine-learning models and provide a step-change in the maturity of natural language understanding. This means that generative AI can produce original and high-quality data that can be used for various applications, such as generating human-like contextualized responses, unique imagery, and even videos.

“Experiencing generative AI firsthand, as in-room advisors, AI assistants, and co-participants is an eye-opening endeavor that is helping our clients rethink, reimagine, and reshape their business strategies.”

How will generative AI impact how we work?

One of the key ways generative AI will affect the way work is performed in a business environment is by automating repetitive and tedious tasks. In many industries, such as manufacturing and logistics, there are many routine tasks that need to be performed every day. These can be time consuming and lead to burnout and decreased productivity among employees.

Through integrating AI, we can now automate these tasks, freeing up employees to focus on more complex and creative work. For example, in manufacturing, generative AI can be used to simulate, predict, and automate quality-control processes, such as inspecting products for defects. This can save time and increase efficiency, allowing employees to focus on more critical tasks such as design and product development.

Another way that generative AI will affect the way work is performed in a business environment is by enhancing creativity. Traditionally, creativity has been considered a human-only attribute, and machines were not considered capable of replicating it. However, generative AI is changing this perception through LLMs capable of creating essays and fictional stories, editing documents, and synthesizing large amounts of corporate information into tangible insights.

Bridging cyber/physical and AI/humans together

We have started the process of integrating and applying generative AI into many aspects of our core work structures with our clients. One key example is putting the AI/human interaction front and center within our Innovation and Strategy Workshops and “AI Unbound” discovery workshops with our clients. This cutting-edge integration of generative AI is helping clients both understand and assess the value of AI when applied in everyday work and then quantify the potential value it possesses for the workplace.

How do we do it? During these workshops we take an integrated approach utilizing speech recognition front ends with text to speech to allow AI to be a participant “in the room” and present with attendees. Within these sessions, AI is always present and can be conversed with, tasked, and consulted for answers. This gen AI-in-the-room approach helps clients see the usage patterns, efficiencies, and roles an AI advisor and collaborator may provide within their organizations.

Utilizing this gen AI-in-the-room approach, our generative AI performs as a scribe, listener, and team anchor, providing summarized conversation details, synthesis during ideation, and clustering activities and cold-eye analysis of thematic areas. During many of these sessions, generative AI also provides creative services by providing artistic elements of graphic art and drawing services to visualize ideas and concepts. Key roles that AI plays include real-time workshop co-facilitator and near real-time playback, synthesis, analysis of ideas, decisions, conclusions, and improvements. It is important to note that, given the evolving nature of LLMs, we currently preclude any sharing of client confidential content, information, and intellectual property to ensure we are protecting and restricting any client property and data from being shared publicly. 

Within the workshops, one evolving usage pattern is how Generative AI can provide a creative spark in a “design-storming session,” providing potential options for product logos, team names, and product/innovation prototypes, not only shaping the content but also evaluating the application and addressable market and constructing a limited non-financial business case. This evolution is happening quickly; as more generative AI models are being marketed and refined with tighter security and privacy guardrails, the expected uptake and disruption of these tools will be tremendous.

Beware the hallucinations or ghost in the machine

It is important to note that the current AI models we utilized are not trained for specific workshop tasks as of yet and are being used at the current basis of generative AI “chat” knowledge, with a combinatorial series of interfaces allowing for a conversational interactive model. There are, as always, a series of drawbacks and continual improvement activities that happen in real time during workshops. There are several technical limitations around speech recognition, memory/history, and “hallucinations” that are always present. In many cases, these hallucinations stem from idiomatic and colloquial misinterpretations or speech-to-text inaccuracies that led down some strange and amusing paths. As this is novel technology, clients generally accept it as “ghosts in the machine.” However, to trust AI means it must provide unquestionably valid analysis or it will become yet another Siri or Alexa equivalent, losing the collective trust of its human operators.

Where is it headed? Building the corporate brain and redefining work

Some of our key development areas are currently around internal and private corporate information LLMs, becoming essentially the “corporate brain,” enabling next-generation game-changing knowledge management, through utilizing the entirety of corporate enterprise internal data and content. This will enable a step change in efficiency of work by providing accessibility to the entirety of internal corporate knowledge with the smoothness of human interfaces and interaction, like ChatGPT and Bard. The critical element of this activity is the creation of privatized and secured AI models, which will dramatically increase uptake and trust in the usage and consumption of these models within businesses.

The first mover opportunity is now

The possibilities with generative AI are almost endless and the acceleration of adoption is taking place at a pace unlike anything before. We are helping shape how our clients integrate AI to accelerate creativity, productivity, and ultimately deliver value through innovative methods to evolve traditional ways of working. Whether through an AI-powered engagement such as an AI-Unbound workshop or developing next-generation private corporate brains, we are always actively working to remove traditional barriers to information and rapid decision making. These new generative AI and LLMs offer tremendous opportunities to rethink and reimagine not just processes, but the entirety of our concept of work, as we integrate AI agents, AI assistants, and digital co-pilots into everyday work constructs.

INNOVATION TAKEAWAYS

GEN AI AND THE EVOLUTION OF WORK

Generative AI can perform basic knowledge-worker tasks with incredible speed and efficiency. This will force corporations to rethink and reimagine how work will get done and the human/AI relationship in the workplace.

GEN AI AND ACCELERATED CREATIVITY

Generative AI can create unique and original content. This will accelerate employee creativity, helping them create new product ideas, market analysis, and design validation.

GEN AI AND ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE

Generative AI can be used to synthesize content on a massive scale, making it ideal for organizations to democratize valuable information and insights.

GEN AI IN-THE-ROOM

Using generative AI as in-room advisors, AI assistants, and co-participants during workshops is an eye-opening endeavor that helps people absorb and appreciate their potential.

Interesting read?

Capgemini’s Innovation publication, Data-powered Innovation Review | Wave 6 features 19 such fascinating articles, crafted by leading experts from Capgemini, and key technology partners like Google,  Starburst,  Microsoft, Snowflake and Databricks. Learn about generative AI, collaborative data ecosystems, and an exploration of how data an AI can enable the biodiversity of urban forests. Find all previous waves here.