Understanding the realm of possibility, and the risk, of generative AI (GenAI) is critically important for CIOs (Chief Information Officers) who want to start using this technology to gain an advantage for their businesses.

 

The value of GenAI will come as businesses start to apply it on behalf of their customers and employees, writes Wojciech Bajda, Director, Public Sector Middle East and Africa, Amazon Web Services. 

 

There are a vast number of enterprise use cases, from product design to customer service to supply chain management and many, many more. New models, chips and developer services in the cloud, like those from AWS, are opening the door to widescale adoption across every industry.

 

Five tips for getting started

Get your data house in order

GenAI is here, and it’s poised to have a transformational impact on our world. The potential upsides of leveraging it in your business are too great — and the downsides of being a laggard too many — not to get started now. But the very beginning of this journey is making sure you have the right data foundations for AI/ML. In order to train quality models, you must start with quality, unified data from your business.

 

For example, Autodesk, a global software company, built a generative design process on AWS to help product designers create thousands of iterations and choose the optimal design. These machine learning models rely on a strong data strategy to user-defined performance characteristics, manufacturing process data, and production volume information.

 

Envision use cases around your own data

GenAI could be used to develop predictive models for businesses or to automate content creation. For example, companies could generate financial forecasting and scenario planning to make more informed recommendations for capital expenditures and reserves.

Or GenAI might act as an assistant for clinicians to create recommendations for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care. Philips is doing just that. The health technology company will use Amazon Bedrock to develop image processing capabilities and simplify clinical workflows with voice recognition, all using GenAI.

 

We’re also seeing AWS customers harness GenAI to optimise product lifecycles, like retail companies looking to more precisely manage inventory placement, out-of-stock issues, deliveries and more — or using GenAI to create, optimise and test store layouts. By identifying these scenarios early and exploring the art of the possible with the data you already have, you can ensure your investment in gen AI is both targeted and strategic.

 

Dive into developer productivity benefits

GenAI can provide significant benefits for developer productivity. It can be a powerful assistant for repetitive coding tasks like testing and debugging, freeing developers to focus on more complex tasks that require human problem-solving skills. CIOs should work with their development teams to identify areas where GenAI can increase productivity and reduce development time.

 

Take outputs with a grain of salt

GenAI is only as good as the data it’s trained on, and there’s always the risk of bias or inaccuracies. Sometimes the output is a hallucination, a response that seems plausible but is in fact made up. So guide your developers, engineers and business users to regard gen AI outputs as directional, not prescriptive.

Manage the business expectations about accuracy and consider some of the special challenges surrounding responsible GenAI. These models and systems are still in their early days and there’s no replacement for human wisdom, judgment and curation.

 

Think hard about security, legal and compliance

As with all technology, security and privacy are paramount, and gen AI introduces new considerations, including around IP. CIOs should work closely with their security, compliance and legal teams to identify and mitigate these risks, ensuring that GenAI is deployed in a secure and responsible manner. Further, scope your plans around compliance and regulations and think carefully about who owns the data you’re using.

 

GenAI has the potential to be a transformational technology, tackling interesting problems, augmenting human performance and maximising productivity. Dive in now, experiment with use cases, harness its benefits, and understand the risk, and you’ll be well-positioned to leverage GenAI for your business.

 

Get hands on with AI

If you want to get AI ready now, AWS has launched a 10-min course designed to fill this gap. The course covers GenAI for Executives, providing a high-level perspective of GenAI, where business executive learners will explore challenges and opportunities with this evolving technology. 

 

It covers Gen AI concepts and why it can address executives’ concerns/challenges and help their business growth. It can also help executives better understand the cloud value proposition and expedite their cloud adoption journey accordingly. This course is free and available on AWS Skill Builder and AWS’s YouTube channel.--TradeArabia News Service