For example, in customer contact or contact centres, Therkelsen-Terry said there was huge opportunity for generative AI. Over the past decade, automated customer service and chatbots have surged, but they’ve been very limited in what they could do.
“Obviously, now, generative AI gives us a lot more capability, so I think we’ll see a resurgence of those channels. Or it could be actually looking at the way that those conversations are happening between agents and customers, and analysing those and extracting really deep insights,” he said.
“The natural language capabilities of generative AI, not just in that generation sense but in the understanding sense, are really a big step change over the technologies we had even two or three years ago.”
All this means that the hallmarks of something like ChatGPT – including very natural speech, or multi-modality that allows for two-way communication in text as well as visuals – can now easily be integrated into a business’ services and technology. Imagine talking to a virtual assistant while shopping for shoes, and simply showing your shoes and saying, “I need more like this”. That may be similar to the promise of older chatbot models, but it’s now a reality.
“And that shop doesn’t have to build a shoe detection model. The ability to observe that shoe, and work out which shoe it is, is built into these models,” Therkelsen-Terry said.
“That trainingless nature is really what enables this generation of innovation. We could have done that before, but building the model probably wouldn’t have been worth the return on investment. Now we have these foundational models, we can build those sorts of capabilities very quickly. And that changes the value equation.”
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But not all businesses Max Kelsen has worked with want a mere efficiency boost. They’re looking for future competitive advantages that could change the way industries work, and not just at the big end of town. Therkelsen-Terry said large companies have the depth of capability and problem sizes that drive them to adopt first, but across the economy digital natives are innovating and adapting.
“If you take a Canva, who’s integrating a lot of generative AI into their tooling, that’s ultimately helping SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises] be faster and more nimble in the way that they create marketing materials for their customers,” he said.
“A lot of the dividends of the technology will accrue across the economy – from very small mum-and-pop businesses right up to very big enterprises. The digital native sector has just taken his technology with both hands and is absolutely running with it.”