Generative AI: go ahead, but proceed with caution

AI is nothing new, but the latest wave of generative models marks an inflection point that business leaders cannot ignore.

For the past decade, AI has become progressively more powerful and pervasive in business, primarily through its uncanny ability to generate predictions, such as the creditworthiness of prospective borrowers or through automating and optimizing existing processes. This has assisted organizations in streamlining day-to-day business decisions.

ChatGPT and its successors, such as GPT-4, have taken that a step further by not only predicting outcomes but prescribing solutions to problems and generating recommendations based on our inputs. And it does so in a way that is astonishingly intuitive, responding to prompts in a conversational format. This means that even the most technophobic executive can use it, with no prior training or skills required. The user interface is an engineering marvel that has democratized AI, putting it into the hands of…