Major global elections, volatile financial markets, extreme weather events, and sophisticated and costly cyberattacks are increasing operational risks across every industry.
Generative AI (GenAI) is redefining how industries navigate this uncertainty and transforming potential risks into powerful opportunities. Organizations across industries are increasingly invested in GenAI – for instance, last year alone the number of organizations deploying GenAI nearly doubled from 33% to 65%. This increased adoption is encouraging businesses to reimagine how they do things, with a whole world of AI-driven organizational models opening up. In fact, estimates suggest GenAI could add up to $44 trillion in value to the global economy each year.
Adapting to this level of change is never easy, and according to our Resiliency Rules report, 97% of senior leaders agree that resilience is an essential factor. The most resilient executives also invest in analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), data visualization and augmented reality. It’s no coincidence that GenAI can play a role in all these areas.
I believe that GenAI is a powerful asset that, if used wisely, sets an organization up for growth and long-term resilience. Here are some key areas where the technology can help boost agility and resilience for your business.
Futureproof your talent
The last few years have seen historic lows in unemployment in the U.S., making it more difficult for organizations to find and retain talent. While increased productivity tends to be a primary area of focus in the GenAI-workforce conversation, there’s another important one: cultivating a world-class talent base.
By providing your employees with GenAI-powered tools such as virtual assistants, you allow them to free themselves from tasks that can be automated. This boosts productivity and helps employees to focus on higher-value (and often more fulfilling) work. In the banking world, for instance, we’re seeing customers use GenAI to proactively identify money laundering efforts and other fraudulent activities. Now, their teams can focus more on proactive defense strategies and less on chasing red herrings. GenAI can also play a vital role in supporting overstretched teams – especially across industries that are facing talent shortages, like science, technology, engineering and math.
Best of all, when GenAI absorbs mundane tasks, employees and the organization have room to grow. We’ve seen incredible success stories where GenAI freed up employees’ time and managers responded by thoughtfully and strategically providing training in new skillsets. This in turn creates entirely new services the organization can offer its customers. In the end, implementing GenAI benefits not just the employees but the entire organization and its bottom line. Stories like these are proof that GenAI can increase both individual and organizational resilience over the long term.
Boost your predictive powers
GenAI can also make your data more resilient. There’s no doubt data is one of the most valuable currencies we have, and usually there’s no shortage of it. But sometimes data sets have holes that would be prohibitively time-consuming or expensive to fill.
Creating data – synthetic data – allows you to fill in those holes and even correct bias in your data set. GenAI can help us create extremely accurate synthetic data that helps us gain insights and make predictions.
This is what it looks like in action: In the life sciences space, synthetic data can help researchers predict the efficacy and safety of a potential medicine, potentially shortening the usual 10-to-15-year drug development timeline. In the insurance industry, from health to automobile, GenAI-generated data can help reduce bias in datasets that can lead to inequitable pricing. We’re also seeing financial services organizations develop GenAI tools to manage risk more nimbly. Gleaning insights from multiple, massive data sets, the technology can simulate a variety of scenarios, from macro-economic upheavals to impacts of severe weather to addressing political strife.
There’s been no shortage of ingenuity in how organizations are using GenAI to help us interpret the present and model the future.
Super-charge innovation
According to Deloitte, 79% of CEOs believe that accelerating innovation is one of GenAI's top use cases. At SAS, we’re already seeing GenAI unlock innovation and revenue for our customers.
A key to GenAI’s power is that it doesn’t exist in isolation. Pairing it with other types of applications can create tools with even more potential. For example, wienerberger, the world’s largest brick manufacturer, combined predictive analytics, IoT technology and digital twins to democratize innovation across its workforce.
Digital twins are created using both generative and traditional AI to make virtual models of real-life objects or systems. With this technology, wienerberger was able to create a virtual model of its production process to test ideas without disrupting brick production.
Using digital twin technology allowed the wienerberger team to test more creative solutions with confidence. Additionally, it allowed employees from across the production lifecycle to weigh in with ideas based on their own areas of expertise. As a result, weinerberger was able to meet its goal of reducing emissions by 15% in pursuit of its goal of becoming a carbon-neutral manufacturer by 2050.
This is just one example of how GenAI is already increasing innovation in real companies, but I am confident we’re only at the beginning of unlocking the fuel GenAI will bring to our organizational innovation.
Seizing the GenAI opportunity
Jumping into the world of GenAI transformation can seem daunting. As the technology is still so new and continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the use cases are still being built. I’m excited to keep sharing the amazing innovation our customers are driving as they increase their agility, resilience and bottom-line performance.
