The advent of GenAI can be compared to the early stages of the internet. Arriving with great excitement and promise that it could improve everyday life. The same can be said for GenAI at present. It’s not always enabling us to do anything new, but it is allowing us to do things an awful lot better and more efficiently than we have been up until now. If we use it properly, that is, says Owen Lewis of KPMG.
Of course, AI has been around for quite a while and has typically been used for classification type tasks. It comes up with probabilistic answers to questions such as what kind of animal is portrayed in an image or if a scan is indicative of cancer. It has proven its capability for these kinds of use over a long period of time.
Humans have always had the edge in creativity, so far at least. We have the ability to think about things in new ways. GenAI is not just classifying, however, it is generating new understanding and outputs which can be unique. Most importantly, the outputs are expressed in language that feels like a human created it.
Preventing biases
In the past, if AI diagnosed a disease, we were able to prove if it was correct and if it could be trusted. GenAI is another matter altogether. If it expresses a view that a person can take a certain direction with their financial arrangements, it can sound like an expert, and we are probably more inclined to trust it without additional proof. It is a bit like the early days of Wikipedia where many people accepted unquestioningly some quite outlandish claims about people and world events.
That’s where GenAI is hugely exciting and somewhat scary. The focus has to be on us being comfortable in what we are creating and putting in place rules and controls to prevent biases and other unwanted outcomes.
Those controls are not always easy to establish. For example, the potential for Gen AI to create highly realistic deep fakes was highlighted when a leading software company's chatbot had to be withdrawn from the market because it was repeating racist remarks it had learned from users. If a global software giant can't prevent that from happening, what chance has a medium-sized retailer?
The potential for GenAI to create highly realistic deep fakes was highlighted by the recent case of an executive in Hong Kong authorising a payment of $100 million as a result of a Teams meeting he had participated in where all the other participants were AI generated images. The executive honestly believed he was speaking to the company CEO during the meeting.
Trusting your gut
More comforting is the fact that the fraud was uncovered and eventually stopped in its tracks by the same executive having a very human instinctive feeling that something could be wrong and going back and double checking.
That’s where GenAI is going to present challenges for us all. Deciphering the real from the product of the technology.
But that should not hold us back from embracing it. For example, we do seem to have an innate belief in humans doing the right thing. When picking up the phone to chat with customer support, we carry a level and trust and confidence in their assistance- despite not having physical interaction with them.
AI doesn’t have any motivation one way or the other beyond what it has learned. Hallucinations are due to gaps in data and nuances of algorithms. We trust people to do things, so, what’s different to trusting an AI chatbot for customer service?
Enhancing customer experiences
For the time being at least, the role for AI is probably in the augmentation of humans. It can give the contact centre the correct information to handle customer queries far quicker than they might be able to find it themselves. It can enable people to do more than they can at the moment and deliver an enhanced customer experience, something we are all looking for.
From an employer perspective, this can make jobs less repetitive, more rewarding and help to reduce staff turnover.
AI may be able to give better financial forecasts to individuals than many professionals based on information they supply to it.
Assisting our healthcare and wider society
If AI has our health and other data from smartwatches and looking at our eyes and skin, and hearing our own description of how we feel, there would be much less chance of us going to see our GP with a problem when it’s too late.
There are lots of studies to show that keeping the brain more active has a positive impact on delaying the onset of diseases such as dementia. AI can be a personal coach, helping people to learn to paint or a new language and keep their minds working.
For businesses launching a new product or service, AI can give them the ability to harness vast array of data and knowledge to deliver innovative, efficient and human-like solutions.
There is every reason to be optimistic about the value AI can bring to society and businesses. We can’t imagine what it might bring in the future, but the approach should be to look at what you’re already doing and how AI can help you do it better. That will create opportunities to learn with the technology, to go on a journey with it and not fear it.
Embracing the technology
You can make it real by experimenting with it, by giving it to staff to use rather than just speaking about it and allowing them to learn with it as well.
Cost needs to be taken into account, of course. Nothing is free and the technology can be very expensive. Organisations must ensure that any usage is value generative.
KPMG is helping a wide range of organisations with their AI adoption strategies. Our team of business and technology experts go on the journey with clients to help them go faster in a safe way to achieve their business objectives. We have 100 people in our AI Centre of Excellence in Belfast, and our EU AI Hub in Dublin to enable us to bring world leading expertise to our clients.
We are also able to bring our experience of AI implementations across the globe to help clients avoid the pitfalls they may encounter and to get a head start on the path to making AI real for their businesses.
Get in touch
At KPMG we understand the pressure business leaders are under to get it right on tech and AI.
To find out more about how KPMG perspectives and fresh thinking can help your business please contact Owen Lewis of our AI team. We’d be delighted to hear from you.
