AI AT WORK

The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence And The Impact For Business Leaders

By Nicole Klemp

IF YOU’VE NOTICED YOUR DAILY NEWS FEEDS ARE SUDDENLY PACKED with articles about artificial intelligence (AI), you’re not alone. Since research laboratory OpenAI publicly launched its highly sophisticated chatbot, ChatGPT, in late 2022, everyone has been buzzing about AI—particularly in the business community.

While AI is nothing new (the first working AI program was designed in the 1950s), technological advancements over the last few years have accelerated progress in the field, and OpenAI just made it accessible to anyone with Internet access.

While AI has historically been within the purview of scientists and technologists, it’s become very real for everyday people. We now see its potential to fundamentally change how we live and work. Whether you embrace AI or remain suspicious of it, there’s no denying it’s likely here for the long haul. In a recent survey by The Deloitte AI Institute, 94% of global business leaders said they consider AI critical to their organizations’ success over the next five years.

WHAT IS GENERATIVE AI?

Advanced chatbots like ChatGPT are powered by generative AI. With this technology, you can have a text conversation with a chatbot and ask it to complete specific tasks, like generating creative ideas, writing various types of content, and even debugging programming code.

Generative AI is “trained” with billions of documents, data points, and bits of information. It scans this content for patterns and uses what it learns to answer questions and respond to requests, mimicking the human style and rhetoric it picks up. But while AI models are said to be trained on highquality academic data from trusted sources, algorithms can’t necessarily tell the difference between good and bad information.

LIMITATIONS & RISKS

While the responses ChatGPT provides are undoubtedly impressive, the outputs are only as good as the inputs it’s been given, so you can never be sure what you’re getting back is 100% accurate. The version of ChatGPT currently available to the public was only trained on data sets available through 2021, and not all the information was fact-checked for accuracy.

For example, when we asked ChatGPT to write an elevator pitch for AKPsi, it said the fraternity has “over 300 chapters,” when there are actually only 183 collegiate chapters today.

To ensure any work produced with the help of AI is accurate and doesn’t plagiarize, human oversight is critical. Areas such as compliance, confidentiality, and data privacy will also become increasingly important in business. Incidents of generative AI presenting bias (which it has learned from the existing biases in our society) have also been uncovered. As organizations find new use cases for AI, principled business leaders will be critical in ensuring corporate values and ethics are upheld.

Ai Is Accelerating Change Across Industries

Since before recorded time, people have used tools to help us live and work. As those tools have become more advanced, some jobs have been eliminated, and new ones have been created. AI is another big step in that evolution of work. Instead of thinking of it as a replacement for humans, we can think of AI as a powerful new tool in our toolbox (or, perhaps, a new co-worker).

While there is still a lot to consider when it comes to incorporating AI into our day-to-day, many startups, corporations, nonprofits, governments, and educational institutions are already developing ways to become more efficient and scalable with the help of AI. In practically every industry, there are some timeconsuming, repetitive tasks that AI can take off employees’ plates. We’re already seeing sales and marketing teams use AI-powered tools to create content and automate tasks like identifying and engaging target buyers. The customer service field is also undergoing transformational change, as sophisticated chatbots replace entry-level roles. Even the finance and accounting industries are preparing for an upheaval. Gartner recently predicted that 40% of finance roles will be reshaped into new positions—or eliminated entirely— by 2025.

Generative AI will be a boon to learning and development too. Khan Academy

What ChatGPT Had to Say About AKPsi

To test ChatGPT’s capabilities, we asked it to provide a brief overview of our fraternity: is launching a pilot with ChatGPT to help tutor students and assist teachers with lesson planning, and Duolingo wants to use it to help people improve their conversational skills as they learn new languages. Researchers are even looking at ways to use AI to train teams to communicate more effectively and become more emotionally intelligent. Many professionals throughout our brotherhood have indicated they’re already using AI in their own organizations, including Larry Ball, a founder of the Psi Tau Chapter at Howard University. “For our clients, AI is largely used to generate art and product concepts, power search and customer content personalization, and more recently, as a feature we support for clients with Google Workspaces."

Even as AI becomes a more prominent part of the modern work team and manual tasks are automated, the need for human creativity and ingenuity will remain. Soft skills, strategic thinking, and strong leadership in the workforce will become more critical than ever.

Embracing The Future Of Work

RESULT: Its response was well-written, but not completely accurate. (AKPsi currently has 183 active chapters, not “over 300.”)

We also asked it to do a little bit of copywriting:

Change can be scary, and sometimes for good reason. We should always tread lightly when a powerful new technology is introduced and think through and plan for all possible outcomes or ramifications. Business leaders can embrace the benefits of AI while staying vigilant and preparing for the potential problems it could create.

As Uncle Ben so wisely told Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. If we can manage to use AI in the right ways, it has the potential to help us increase innovation and productivity, improve interactions, and create new opportunities.

RESULT: It wrote a decent membership pitch, but probably won’t win any advertising awards any time soon.

As more organizations incorporate AI into their products, services, and workflows, there will be a massive need for enablement on the technology and upskilling for new jobs. If we can leverage AI to make work more efficient, we can spend more time on what matters most, personally and professionally.