Embracing Generative AI: Are You On Board?
Overview of the Gartner Opening Keynote: Empowered People and Groundbreaking Innovations Deliver Your Future (Gartner IOCS Conference 2023).
If you have read my other articles, you cannot ignore that I strongly believe Generative AI (GenAI) is an incredible opportunity for CIOs and IT managers to rebrand their image, reconnect with strategic business objectives, and remotivate their teams. Two days ago (5 December 2023), during the opening keynote of the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2023, GenAI was again at the forefront of the stage.
For those who do not have the time to watch it, below is an overview of what was said about GenAI.
Generative Transformation
First, they introduced the concept of Generative Transformation. In other words, transformation as a way of operating, which involves:
Building upon what has already been done
Adapting and moving in new directions
Continuously transforming
Continuously improving performance
Continuously adapting to new technologies to meet new business objectives
Some key figures about GenAI from the latest Gartner CIO survey include:
80% of CIOs and Tech Leaders plan to adopt GenAI within 3 years (with a humorous note that employees and customers are already using it!)
75% of CEOs have tried ChatGPT
50% of CIOs are concerned about hallucinations and reasoning errors
Gartner highlighted four actions that CIOs need to take to engage in Generative Transformation:
Determine your ambition
Keep skills at the forefront
Establish guardrails (immediately)
Build and execute a plan
1. Determine your ambition
It is all about how far you are willing to go? Possibilities with GenAI are vast, ranging from everyday productivity to game-changing [creativity].
The initial domain to explore is often ‘Productivity’, which includes automating repetitive tasks, writing scripts or documentation. Gartner estimates a 5 to 20% productivity gain with GenAI and recommends to aggressively adopt GenAI for everyday productivity. However, they also encourage CIOs and Tech leaders to aim beyond, reaching the game-changing horizon that requires imagination and staff empowerment:
Which processes should be fundamentally changed?
How can the systems and silos that have been built over decades be deconstructed and rebuilt?
Note: To be impactful and ready to embrace GenAI, it is essential to have the capability to measure these productivity gains. I encourage you to document and benchmark the targeted processes now, enabling you to subsequently communicate the impact you have realised.
2. Keep skills at the forefront
The second action focuses on your staff: ‘they need to understand how to leverage GenAI technology effectively’. As I mentioned in a previous article, most consulting firms envision GenAI not as a replacement for staff but as an augmentation of their work. This was also emphasised during the keynote by Gartner. Consequently, effective use of GenAI necessitates investment in both training and skills development.
Gartner predicts that 90% of organisations will experience more than 10 revenue-impacting events annually due to inadequate GenAI skills and testing investments
You need to ensure that you have an infrastructure and operations culture that rewards creativity, experimentation, innovation and not just productivity, otherwise GenAI will never leave the realm of the everyday.
3. Establish guardrails
Of course, the risks associated with GenAI were raised; however, this part would require broader coverage. In a nutshell:
Ensure that your confidential data is protected.
Verify the outputs produced by GenAI before using them.
Consider all data entered into public GenAI models such as ChatGPT as non-confidential (i.e., as public information).
Validate any GenAI services before your organisation uses them.
Create guardrails for your staff but do not completely tie their hands. Give them room to innovate and experiment.
4. Build and execute a plan
Ultimately, the most crucial action involved transforming good intentions into an actionable plan. They proposed an intentional and phased approach for the deployment of GenAI across infrastructure and operations… And as you learn more, the plan should adapt! This may seem obvious, but it is nonetheless important to highlight. They suggested the following plan:
Answer Questions: Begin by using GenAI to answer questions from both public and internal knowledge bases. For instance, vendors are developing GenAI models trained for service desk use, making virtual agents much more effective and reducing staff time.
Augment Tools: Gartner predicts a significant shift towards embedded GenAI capabilities in our IT operations tools, substantially improving productivity.
Write Text: GenAI excels at creating documentation, whether it’s IT processes, best practices, or training materials.
Create Task Scripts: Utilise GenAI for routine online administrative tasks like configuring servers, managing networks, or setting up user accounts.
Generate Automation: Often, we lack resources (staff or time) to design or engineer automations. GenAI can assist! It can analyse complex, cross-silo data sources, identify anomalies, and propose actions.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 40% of digital workplace operational activities will be performed using GenAI-enhanced management tools.
While this primarily serves as an overview of the first part dedicated to GenAI, there were two other presenters. If, like me, you believe recruitment often falls short, I recommend watching the last part of the video — replacing job descriptions by capability descriptions — which resonated a lot with me.
Jobs are transient but capabilities are lasting.