HOW GENERATIVE AI IS CREATING A “HOLY SH#T!” MOMENT FOR ALL OF US

ALON ROZEN

The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 was an “oh sh*t!” moment heard across the globe! Universities, faculty, students, businesses, journalists and everyone else finally realized 1) that AI will impact their lives sooner than later, 2) that the technology was finally ready for prime time, 3) that abundant practical use cases made it highly attractive across education, business and many common tasks, and 4) that many businesses and jobs would never be the same. While many people instinctively reacted with something along the lines of “wow, this is going to blow up Google’s search business”, others realized that this was much bigger and will disrupt much more than that and much faster than anyone predicted. To put it in a nutshell, IMHO, ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions are going to radically disrupt teaching, learning, customer service, research, content creation, content consumption, ad-based business models, and a whole lot more. So, fasten your seatbelts, as this is going to be a wild ride!

Oddly, I am quite conflicted in my response to the development of market-ready generative AI solutions. As an innovator and professor of innovation, working with startups, these tools are amazing time savers, productivity boosters and go-to-market accelerators. If one of the key objectives of lean innovation is low-cost and rapid go-tomarket, I don’t see a startup in the world that would not find a benefit from using ChatGPT or equivalent. From researching the problem they are aiming to solve, finding solutions from multiple industries to similar problems, sizing a market, identifying competitors and potential investors, preparing great visuals and presentations, and creating a demo, generative AI can help do all of that and more in record time and at no or little cost.

With my educator’s hat, on the one hand, I am worried about how this will impact learning, but on the other, I am excited about how this will impact teaching/facilitating/ training. The fact is everyone knew education was prime for disruption for some time now. But many thought the disruption would come from MOOCs, EdTech and remote learning. That put a dent into current models but did not really disrupt too much. It has become an add-on to traditional learning, accelerated thanks to Covid-19, but not truly changing the way we learn or teach. Generative AI is like throwing a stick of dynamite into the dusty library of education. When the dust settles, we will have to reinvent large parts of the process quickly. This is a good thing, and society will be better off for it, I’m convinced, but the speed at which we must rethink the learning process is quite stunning and, I must admit, daunting. Homework, assessments, presentations, essays, synthesis of text, analyses and basically any kind of production that any professor has ever asked of a student can be “hacked” with generative AI, and what took hours and days can now be completed in minutes. The result is not yet perfect, but it is more than good enough for many applications, and very soon, it will be better than good enough. ChatGPT is already passing exams (MBA, legal, medical, …) left and right, and this is just the start.

As a parent of young children, I have already introduced them to ChatGPT, and when I reverted to Google, my kids thought it was broken or dumb. What I like about ChatGPT versus Google when I am with my kids is that there are no ads, no sponsored content, just a clean interface with the answers to their questions. No links that can lead them to content I’d rather they not be exposed to as children. Also, with ChatGPT,

I am relatively confident that asking about space travel will not result in me seeing ads about space tourism and other content I have no interest in seeing or having my kids see. In terms of a business model, it looks like we are heading to subscription-based pricing without ads. If this could free us, as a society, from ads being the motor of nearly all the internet and social media sites we use most often (in the West), then this will also be a significant inflexion point for the next generation.

As a researcher, I had my own “oh sh#t!” moment. As I am in the middle of writing an academic article (since you asked, on circular business models), I decided to see how generative AI could help me. One application is a site that allows researchers to enter their research question to generate a list of 15 highly relevant references at speed. I went back to my own references, painstakingly curated over several months and with the help of leading writers in the domain, and picked my top 15 articles. I then entered my research question and waited for all of 10 seconds. The result was amazing –12 of my 15 articles were on the list, and the other three that I had not found were extremely relevant too. Three months versus 10 seconds, amazing! I can’t imagine what will happen in the research domain when companies like Meta release (or re-release) their own generative AI solutions for researchers. Expect a seismic shift and an explosion of publications-Chronicle of a disruption foretold.

Speaking of disruption, generative AI will be most impactful in the realm of productivity for knowledge workers. With all of my hats, I have been incredibly impressed by how much generative AI is helping me and my team boost our productivity. From presenting high-level presentations on the fly to creating exactly the right visual for our needs to gaining relatively deep understanding of a field in a record amount of time, ChatGPT has been extremely impressive. In fact, it is so productive that I have already heard of junior consultants, who were principally working to help senior consultants prepare briefs, presentations, and slides, being let go. Like the assistants and secretaries of yesteryear, will this be the end of another layer of the business world? And if it is displacing certain jobs, what new jobs will be created? These are some of the most challenging questions that we will need to find answers to in the months and years ahead.

Like the personal computer, the internet, and the smartphone, technology tends to make us more productive and creates more jobs. Will this time be different? I doubt it, but this will definitely be the debate going forward.

Even though the general feeling is that ChatGPT is a revolution, the truth is that it is hardly an evolution of the state of the art. Companies like Google, Meta and Nvidia have bigger and better performing (LLM) models – for the applications for which they were developed – but they were not packaged as well for the general public as OpenAI has with ChatGPT. So, while it feels revolutionary, it is rather an important tipping point in the collective consciousness about how AI can already be harnessed to make our lives more productive – simplifying some tasks, accelerating other tasks, and allowing us to do things that we haven’t done before. A collective “oh sh#t!” moment in a positive sense mixed in with a bit of uncertainty about what will be displaced in the movement of “creative destruction” a la Schumpeter that generationimpacting innovations like this create.

What we already know is that the convergence of generative AI and the development of robotics and automation has created the possibility of enhancing human productivity in a way that we have not seen since the mechanical revolution in agriculture at the turn of the century. Then too, people feared job destruction, but the reality was the complete opposite and massive job creation. Let’s hope that history repeats itself this time too, and that we can look back at this moment as another crucial inflexion point in the history of modern business, living, and education. But, in the meantime, I hope we all enjoy playing with the many generative AI solutions that are coming to market and learn to harness them creatively, positively, and ethically - sometimes for profit and mostly for good.

I was recently asked to present at TechInnov in Morocco on the impact of generative AI on content and creator economies. My conclusion then and now is that ChatGPT and similar tools will help us do more, better, and faster. And that it will only get bigger, better and faster in the weeks, months and years ahead. Beyond the hype and the areas in which it still needs to improve, this still sounds like one of the best value propositions I’ve ever heard!

Biography

Alon Rozen is Dean, CEO and Professor of Innovation at École des Ponts Business School.