7th CDDO Asia Summit: GenAI Adoption Will Determine Winners, Losers

Businesses are optimistic that AI will bring us to a better place, according to an informal poll of more than 150 delegates at the 7th Chief Digital & Data Officer (CDDO) Asia Summit on Wednesday.

Paul Blackler of Wavestone came to this conclusion after calling for a show of hands at the conference. In his keynote, he discussed how CDOs can maximize the benefits of GenAI and prevail in their digital journeys in an AI world.

The era of GenAI

It is undeniable that GenAI is upending entire industries. And businesses cannot continue doing things the same way if they want to stay relevant.

“Leaders must accept GenAI has the potential to disrupt their business. And this is not just in the technology, not just back office or front office functions,” said Blackler.

“GenAI is completely revolutionizing the software development industry. How we generate code, how we integrate prompts into our process, how we automate the CI/CD pipeline, how we set up our teams, onshore and offshoring. It is [also] accelerating the low-code, no-code agenda so that those without a software development training can take applications into production.”

Even traditional industries are not spared, he says, pointing to how photographers specializing in taking complex photos of industrial sites are being outbid by startups that use GenAI to create the photos off-site.

Leadership conundrum

Mastery of GenAI will determine the winners and losers in the long term, says Blackler. This could be hastened as the impact of AI is felt across disparate industries, culminating in multiple inflection points that happen simultaneously.

But even as businesses rush to roll out GenAI initiatives, there is confusion over who should take leadership over it. According to Blackler, 16% of technology leaders believe that AI adoption should be led by the CEO. Ironically, most business leaders think AI adoption should be helmed by tech leaders.

“The need for technology leaders to align to business goals is non-negotiable because it's such a high-stakes game. There is no room for misaligned ambiguity and indecisiveness,” he said.

The AI journey

How can organizations implement AI to address business use cases? For companies creating intellectual property or products that give them a unique competitive advantage, Carlos Queiroz, the managing director and head of Data Science Engineering at Standard Chartered Bank suggested that businesses should go with open-source AI models for absolute control over their data.

Finally, AI is only as good as one’s data. And many IT and data leaders are facing unprecedented challenges with scaling their ability to manage more data, observed Anton Lee, who heads System Infrastructure Tech Sales at IBM.

“There’s issues with [ever-growing] data. Some statistics show about 250% growth in data over the next few years. They are in ever-more locations; they are everywhere, in the cloud, on-premises, applications, silos, and as a result, there’s a lot of complexity,” said Lee.

Ultimately, what is clear is that organizations must think more deeply about how they plan to support and empower their AI initiatives.

Where are we headed with AI? Blackler probably captured it best when he quoted Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: “In the short term, things change much less than we think. But in the long term, things change much more than we can ever imagine.”

The time to get started is now.

Image credit: CDOTrends