Are you ready for Generative AI?

It’s easy to imagine everyone in an organisation soon having access to cognitive assistants powered by large language model-based AI.

Sitting at your computer, you could ask your AI assistant questions throughout the day about the tasks you’re working on and have conversations with it. You could talk to it as you would a trusted colleague and get help testing hypotheses, trying things out, gathering information from a knowledge base, organising your day, and so on. Such functionality would help you do your job better and faster.

There’s also a lot of potential in functionality that resembles GitHub Copilot, a generative AI tool that offers on-the-fly coding suggestions for programmers. For everyday enterprise system users, we can imagine every text-entry box automated to suggest likely inputs based on the context and what you’ve done before. (Of course, the human user always has the final word on what the system should do). We can imagine Copilot-like technology deployed at scale everywhere.

A bit further out, it’s only a small-speculative jump to having a digital twin for various work personas, such as IT help desk agents. In such a future, newly hired agents would get up to speed quickly because they would benefit from the autocompletion and automatic interface of their digital twin, which is the product of the AI system learning from hundreds of workers that came before them. Anything that a user produces can serve as feedback to further train these models through reinforcement learning, so the feedback itself contributes to making the models better. Soon the digital twin might be as capable as top human performers in a variety of everyday situations. 

Looking at products, we can imagine companies providing highly trained foundation models for specific industries or verticals. A foundation model tailored for telecom, manufacturing, or the public sector would understand the specific vocabulary and processes unique to those sectors. These models would be fine-tuned on specialized data sets that allow them to understand context-specific nuances. Companies would then provide them as part of a platform capability or service.

If we think about foundation models as a new kind of operating system for AI, the possibilities become quite exciting.

Looking into the future, we can imagine the emergence of what I’ll call “intelligence value chains,” an ecosystem of products, services, and applications based on the pervasive use and availability of AI-based foundation models. We’re already seeing the emergence of specialised AI prompt stores where short pieces of natural language that efficiently query models to accomplish a task are being sold for a couple of dollars apiece.

This has two important implications for the future. One possible route is to imagine that standardised AI dialogue turns, consisting of a text-in/text-out exchange, become so important to business that they turn into a form of cognitive commodity. Not unlike a barrel of oil or a bushel of wheat, a cognitive commodity would be a standardised unit for AI services. From there, it’s not hard to imagine the creation of cognitive futures contracts to guarantee the future availability of AI services at a set price.

A second possibility, perhaps nearer and more concrete, is the emergence of an app economy for these models. This would allow not only prompts, but also a combination of prompts plus additional training parameters to plug into the model to produce new behaviours, in the same way that apps for iOS and Android can enrich our phones with new functionality. 

If this market for customising foundation models takes off, it might give rise to flywheel effects in favour of some models, which would garner more users because they have more apps, and more app developers because they have more users. (In effect, these models would become the AI version of Microsoft Windows or Apple’s iOS.)

It’s always difficult to predict how revolutionary technologies will shape the future. I believe this moment represents the beginning of a new era in software, with the industry likely to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50. When it comes to enterprise-specific foundation models, conversational interfaces will become a primary way users interact with machines, on an equal footing with today’s point-and-click interfaces. Users will be empowered to interact and partner with their machines more intuitively, to create highly customisable and sophisticated workflows, to automate complex daily tasks, and to be more effective both at work and throughout their lives.