A framework for thinking about Generative AI in your business

The possibilities for generative AI are nearly endless, and while this represents a great deal of opportunity for businesses it can be wildly disorienting -  especially when so many vendors over promise and underdeliver. This is why we believe it is important to focus your thinking with the following questions: 

“What business problems or opportunities do we have? 

“Can generative AI help us solve any of them?”

If we’re being honest, we all tend to overcomplicate business. If you really think about it, most of what a business does is in service of the following three things: efficiency, growth and innovation. It really is that simple. But, without being honest about this simplicity it becomes difficult for a business to identify the problems and opportunities it actually has, and to develop a clear path toward resolving them. Which in turn makes it difficult to examine how technology can be leveraged to improve its outcomes. Generative AI is an exceptionally powerful tool, but only when it is focussed. When applied in the right way to the right circumstance or task it can provide truly extraordinary increases in efficiency, growth and innovation. 

Take for example a construction firm that uses a computer vision model to examine the differences in two sets of construction drawings. Traditionally, it could take a graduate up to a week to perform this task, but for the model this is the work of seconds. Even If we acknowledge that current models may be only able to perform 50% to 60% of this task, it is still a sizable reduction in workload -  delivered instantly. At scale these time savings are immense, and in this example a graduate is now able to deliver work that would’ve taken them a full week in a couple of days, all to the same standard. 

The generative AI industry is very adept at offering solutions at the personal productivity end of the spectrum. Use cases such as generating content, answering questions, search and summarization provide an exceptional increase in individual productivity which at scale flow onto businesses as well. The other end of this spectrum is leveraging the power of generative AI to solve more complex problems, for instance providing insights and actions as opposed to just summarization, helping your business build intelligent workflows and even solving problems that can only be done by humans, or ones which can’t yet be solved at all. This side of the spectrum is commonly referred to as operational excellence, and it is something we’re seeing business leaders and founders embrace with open arms. Leveraging the power of generative AI to solve more complex issues will dramatically increase the efficiency of a business, and will importantly contribute to a culture of continuous innovation where more and more complex issues are being solved, which will ultimately result in a much greater offering and a considerably higher level of customer satisfaction. This in turn will lead to higher spend and better retention, meaning both businesses and customers will reap the benefits from adopting generative AI in their business. 

Historically, generative AI use cases have involved deploying a bespoke model to service a single use case. The problem with this approach is that it is expensive, time consuming, and importantly it isn’t repeatable. If a business wanted to explore another use case, they would have to start the process again and build from the ground up. Because the AI space is so dynamic at the moment, it is likely that during this time a new and better model will have been released. This adds additional risk for businesses using this traditional approach, as it means often that they sink costs into building out a use case, only to see a superior model be released part way through the development phase. 

At SmartSpace our mission is to get our customers to value faster, safer and with their growth in mind. We have focused on developing high quality infrastructure to serve as the foundation, and taken care of all of the building blocks. That leaves our customers able to orient their time and energy on building out compelling use cases that not only move the needle, but without the worry of having to start from scratch each and every time. Because all the difficult work has been done for you by us, building out these new use cases is now the work of minutes and not months. On top of this, our infrastructure is highly adaptive meaning your business can evolve as technology evolves. SmartSpace offers the ability for customers to seamlessly swap to new models with just a few clicks of a button, saving you valuable engineering resources, and from having redundant use cases, while ensuring you can focus on solving the task at hand instead of just building the infrastructure to do so.