Making Business Great Again or Puff the Magic Dragon?
Generative AI is, frankly, little more than a highly trained monkey genetically spliced to a parrot.
Many New Zealand and Australian companies have been beating down the doors of high-priced consulting firms to understand just how AI might benefit them.
Another well-worn path has been to the doors of company CIO’s who in many cases seem almost as confused as the rest of us. They spout technology terms like LLM (Large Language Models), Agentic AI, Natural Language Processing, Predictive Modelling and Robotics Process Automation. Most have failed to describe practical, and measurable business benefits
After reading dozens of articles and interviewing many of my most learned colleagues in the AI space I remain underwhelmed at how New Zealand businesses are moving to leverage AI to drive profit and growth.
So what makes AI Different?
To answer that question, we need to look at the two major threads of AI – Generative AI and Agentic AI.
Generative AI is delivered in tools such as Co-Pilot, Gemini and Chat GPT. Instead of us creating our content its automation capability allows us to do instant research, generate sophisticated text and formulate bold and innovative images, all in seconds. If we don’t like what we first see we just tell the AI to do the job again. Seconds later a simpler or more detailed edit is created depending on our interaction with the system.
However, as a productivity tool, Generative AI is little more than a new generation of personal assistants. In the same way that word processing replaced millions of typists and an entire typewriter industry in the late 1980s, Generative AI will replace millions of jobs where their sole value is creating the documents necessary to do business.
In the most simple of terms, if any part of your role is creating and refining documents (sales proposals, job descriptions, tender reports, legal contracts, patient health notes, meeting agendas and minutes etc) then this part of your role will not exist within three to five years.
Scary as this may sound to some of us, including me because I like writing posts like this, Generative AI is not going to bring the world of business to an end any more than the PC and Smartphone has made our lives more tolerable and our spare time more available.
Generative AI is, frankly little more than a highly trained monkey genetically spliced to a parrot. The model is limited by its inability to learn, especially in the context of your unique business data. It cannot, for example, analyse the trends in the New Zealand electricity market and predict pricing movements based on the legal, commercial, production and consumption factors available.
Agentic AI models, however, are designed specifically for this type of reasoning.
Part Two Agentic AI. Should we welcome our new robot overlords or pull the plug now?