How Businesses Can Benefit From GenAI

GenAI offers the potential to revolutionize knowledge work and dramatically boost productivity. But while it promises greater productivity, integrating GenAI effectively can be challenging due to the autonomy and variability inherent to such roles.

A new Harvard Business Review (HBR) report explores the disciplines and changes required to fully leverage and integrate GenAI into business processes, identifying key strategies for successful implementation and adoption across organizations.

I highlight three of the most crucial disciplines.

Behavioral change

Unsurprisingly, the first thing that needs to be addressed is behavioral change. Despite its near-magical ability to craft properly written prose, GenAI requires extensive guidance to work.

But first, workers need to learn whether to use GenAI at all during various stages of the content creation process, and at the right times. Crucially, they must understand the possibility of hallucinations and take the time to review the output of GenAI models – not the most natural inclination.

The requisite behavioral changes will differ by roles and individuals. As noted by the HBR: “In call centers, organizations need to determine the appropriate sequence of human and machine interactions with customers. Whereas lawyers need to decide whether they should employ it for brainstorming, generation of first drafts of briefs or contracts, refining of existing drafts, or some other purpose.”

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Experimentation

GenAI tools don’t improve the quality of output or boost productivity, but the only sure way to determine the level of value is to design a controlled experiment, suggests HBR. It called for controlled experiments in which some are asked to use GenAI tools and others do without it – and measure their productivity or effectiveness.

For instance, despite trying for 20 months, I’ve found that GenAI is dismal at writing editorial content. This can be attributed to GenAI's propensity for bland, highly similar output, and how using it on niche topics is easily detectable by savvy readers who are specialists in their respective domains.

The report called for companies to run their own experiments to estimate what is possible – and what won’t work, and to use their own people where possible to build the capability on an ongoing basis.

Human development

Finally, businesses cannot get the full benefit of GenAI without first developing their workers. HBR argues correctly that businesses must start with a commitment to using AI to augment employee capabilities, not replace them, to persuade workers to engage with GenAI. This won’t be easy, however, given the inevitable horror stories from other companies where workers are persuaded to use GenAI to do their work before being retrenched.

Once committed, substantial learning must take place before the workforce becomes proficient at GenAI. Among others, this includes a fundamental understanding of the technology, prompt engineering, fact-checking, and how to integrate the technology into workflows.

Conclusion

The successful integration of GenAI into knowledge work requires a delicate balance between technological advancement and human expertise. Organizations must recognize that while GenAI offers powerful capabilities, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Only by establishing the right disciplines can the foundation be laid and an eventual symbiotic relationship created between human intelligence and artificial intelligence to drive innovation and maximize productivity.

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