Innovative capabilities, methods, and approaches have evolved over the years, like the increasing popularity of Design Thinking, Jobs Theory, Lean Startup, Sprints, and Scrums, to help companies navigate market uncertainty and get to winning solutions faster in service of keeping existing brands relevant or launching new ones. Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities have been used for decades; however the tidal wave of interest and momentum around Generative AI and its potential to unlock new opportunities can’t be ignored.
While there is uncertainty about some of the implications of Gen AI, The Garage Group, like other courageous leaders has proactively leaned in to understand how this capability could be leveraged to strengthen our work, and how our BigCo partners are likely to strategically leverage Gen AI as a competitive advantage.
We recently attended the Autonomous Innovation Summit hosted by the Board of Innovation. The 2-day virtual event brought together roughly 10,000 leaders from across the globe representing multiple industries and fields of expertise to explore the implications and effective application of AI.
Here are some of the themes that stood out to us…
1. AI creates opportunities for companies to make progress toward their ESG goals
- AI’s predictive capabilities can help find efficiencies across the supply chain and enable companies to better predict and respond to variations in supply and demand to minimize waste and storage of excess inventory while enabling more strategic collaboration between businesses and retailers.
- AI is likely to lead to a redistribution of work and responsibilities that celebrates diversity of thought and experience as a catalyst for breakthrough innovation, enabling personalized development plans that promote more rewarding means for contribution.
2. Gen AI is a tool to better predict consumer needs and preferences, enabling companies to provide increasingly personalized content that can improve market success among future launches.
- Large companies F100+ are developing firewalled and proprietary Gen AI platforms that are enabling them to better leverage the historic data they have collected.
- These same companies are using these proprietary platforms to accelerate the development and optimization of products/services while minimizing the risk of exposure to competition.
3. Gen AI is expanding beyond the constraints of a tool, and in some cases being leveraged as a virtual team member.
- Passive co-pilot: tell Gen AI what to do and it will generate answers.
- Active co-pilot: tell Gen AI what you think of the answer it generated, and it will factor that into future responses.
- Like human team-members, Gen AI is also susceptible to bias, making it critical to proactively feed data that doesn’t favor a single perspective.
4. While AI shows tremendous promise in its application across multiple disciplines and industries, there is still caution and concern, leading to controlled experimentation. Ethics and governance are top topics of discussion leading to slower adoption in some areas.
- Many marketing companies are experimenting with AI content to both assess quality and consumer receptivity.
- Creatives disciplines, thought to be vulnerable to substitution, are in many cases the earliest adopters, seeing AI as a creative resource to push the boundaries of what is possible.
5. Service agencies and consultants supporting large companies will need to be ambidextrous, demonstrating a working knowledge of AI and having the ability to help companies in its effective applications.
- Companies large enough to have proprietary Gen AI platforms will still rely on partners to help guide AI usage.
- As these capabilities become more prevalent, companies will need to take additional care in deciphering the data/insights they collect to ensure they are human-based and not AI generated.
If you are curious about the evolving capabilities of AI or exploring the practical applications of Gen AI in your business, let’s connect!
