How can CEOs maximize value creation using Generative AI?

It was only a matter of time before it happened. From not featuring at all in their priority list in 2022, tech modernization emerged has the second-highest priority for CEOs in 2023, according to a global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value. Leaders realize that regardless of the business vertical their organization belongs to, embracing technological advancements is crucial to achieving their productivity objectives. With the emergence of tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, AI coding assistants, and others turning the spotlight on generative AI, CEOs are seeking ways to leverage this transformative technology to unlock value. The capability of generative AI-based solutions to create original content, accomplish in-depth analysis, make intelligent decisions, deliver real-time insights and predictions, identify trends, and transform business workflows is prompting CEOs to explore its application in across operations different facets of business, to discover untapped opportunities for growth and innovation.

Leveraging Generative AI for value creation

About 75 percent of the value that generative AI use cases could deliver falls across three areas: Customer operations, marketing and sales, and software engineering. Organizations are already using generative AI to enhance existing products, services, and operations. A Deloitte report highlights that breakthroughs in generative AI could increase global gross domestic product (GDP) by nearly US$7 trillion, and boost productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points. CEOs can capture this value by strategically reshaping the operations of their enterprises. By identifying the right business priorities and achieving the optimal balance between human skills and the application of generative AI, CEOs can drive value and outpace the competition. If they can identify specific applications that align with their industry and business objectives, they can leverage generative AI to gain a competitive edge.

Here are some areas where generative AI can have a substantial impact:

Personalization

Generative AI-based tools can make use of advanced algorithms and data analysis to offer customers personalized product and service recommendations that can create more value by providing more up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Using a combination of an existing knowledge base and deriving new insights from extensive datasets, generative AI can create hyper-personalized customer experiences with real-time decisioning and next-best actions.

Customer service

Businesses can elevate customer service by integrating generative AI in online chatbots and automated phone calls. It lends a more humanized and authentic touch to customer interactions. By seamlessly switching to the customer's native language or incorporating real-time information, such as recent website activity, it enables a context-aware experience. By analyzing vast amounts of data, it helps generate actionable insights which can be used to providing provide contextual offers that balance the needs of the business and customers’ desires. In this way, it allows an enterprise to achieve greater customer loyalty and engagement, which can translate into higher profitability.

Autonomous workflows

Generative AI can be used across business operations. For instance, it can transform how businesses create digital solutions with automated software engineering. With tools that generate engineering designs, help write and debug code, analyze log files and other data to identify the root cause of incidents, and generate test cases, it can improve the accuracy and quality of software solutions, resulting in greater productivity. Generative AI can also automate content creation, helping enterprises produce high-quality articles, reports, marketing materials, and other collateral. This not only saves costs but also ensures consistency in branding and messaging. A manufacturing enterprise can use generative AI to optimize supply chain logistics. By analyzing historical sales data, market trends, and external factors like weather patterns, generative AI models can provide more accurate demand forecasts, which will help optimize inventory levels and costs, enhance responsiveness to market fluctuation, and improve overall efficiency. Enterprises can automate the documentation processes with generative AI, saving time and ensuring better quality and process control.

Product design and development

Generative AI is also transforming product design and development. By combining vast datasets of consumer preferences, market trends, and other information, it is empowering businesses to create products that resonate deeply with customers. It also helps accelerate the ideation phase with recommendations on product variants, packaging, etc. It can also uncover new consumer needs and untapped market opportunities. This can lead to the development of products and services seamlessly tailored to customer needs and preferences, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and market competitiveness.

Marketing and branding

Integrating generative AI in marketing and branding offers a range of benefits, from creative content generation and strategic allocation of advertising budgets to nuanced customer insights. Generative AI can automate content creation, helping enterprises produce high-quality articles, reports, marketing materials, and other collateral. This saves costs and ensures consistency in branding and messaging.

It can be used to categorize market and customer data, aiding personalized marketing campaign development. By leveraging techniques such as sentiment analysis, trend identification, and regression analysis, generative AI enables marketers to extract invaluable insights. They can be used for targeted marketing initiatives that ensure the delivery of relevant messages to the right audience, thereby boosting receptivity, engagement, and conversion rates.

Embarking on the Generative AI journey

The era of generative AI is here, and it is offering unprecedented opportunities to elevate creativity, enhance productivity, and reimagine customer experiences. CEOs can take advantage of this transformative technology by:

• Prioritizing the use cases that will accelerate value for the organization

• Adopting an incremental approach focused on quick wins to increase its adoption within the organization

• Setting up a foundation by investing in the right technology infrastructure, building talent, and restructuring to adapt to new ways of working

• Partnering with technology companies to implement generative AI solutions and integrate them with existing systems