Business organisations should ride the wave of generative AI to create opportunities to raise their value to create new and disruptive ways of earning revenue, improving their productivity and reducing their costs and risk, according to Patama Chantaruck, the managing director of Accenture Thailand.

“Generative AI is growing exponentially. We should realise a new dawn of values, potential and possibilities,” Ms Patama said in a speech titled “Defining New S-Curve: Unleashing growth with generative AI” on Wednesday.

She was speaking at the Bangkok Post Tech Conference 2023, which was presented under the banner “Thailand’s Innovation Redefined: New S-Curve, AI, and Virtual Banking”.

Generative AI has already emerged as a US$7-trillion global ecosystem due to the large investment of tech firms, investors who have taken a punt on AI startups and other players, Ms Patama said.

For example, investors bet on at least 110 deals involving generative AI startups in 2022, she said.

Accenture is investing $3 billion over a three-year period in its data and AI practices to help clients across all industries rapidly and responsibly advance and use AI to achieve greater growth, efficiency and resilience, she added.

Ms Patama said it was easy to see the overwhelming popularity of ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched last November — which gained 100 million users within just two months of its launch.

Generative AI is bringing new business value and disruptive opportunities in three key ways, she said.

First, it is an opportunity for generating more revenue from product development.

Second, it can help reduce costs and increase opportunities for productivity in terms of from worker augmentation, long term talent optimisation, and process improvement.

Last of all, it can help reduce risks in doing businesses, she said.

“Generative AI will enhance, not erase, jobs,” Ms Patama said.

“Generative AI is giving people the tools to be more creative and to create compelling new content from code, text, video, images and speech synthesis and translation.”

Ms Patama went on to say it is also bringing new AI capabilities that have the potential to radically reinvent how work is done, from creation and adaptation to interaction.

There are several types of generative AI applications from advisors for knowledge work, to content creation, visual design, assisting product development, automating business and IT processes, and protecting information security and governance, she said.

AI cannot reach its full potential until companies figure out all the data, which means breaking down data silos and modernising their data foundations, she noted.

Generative AI in 2023

AI application use cases include generating topic ideas for content writing, conducing key work research, creating content structure, generating meta descriptions, creating sitemap codes, and much more, she said.

Ms Patama said industries can expect to enjoy a positive impact from generative AI, ranging from risk management and detecting bank fraud to generating user-friendly explanations for loan denials.

In the fashion industry, generative AI can drive design, while in the gaming industry it can produce content generation, analyse the behaviour of players, and even perform game testing.

AI-phobia and fear of a digital future

There are many risk areas involving AI, including data privacy and security, discrimination, intellectual property theft, identity product liability, trust and more.

Ms Patama, however, was more concerned by the prospect of “hallucinations” — when an AI gives a confident response that is not congruent with its training data — which she said is caused by training AI programs with the wrong or low-quality data. This can result in poor decisions and have legal implications, she noted.

She said organisations need to create sound AI working environments. Responsible AI begins with the implementation of certain principles and requires good governance, solid controls, technology and adoption as well as policy and culture training, she said.

6 keys to embracing AI

Ms Patama said there are six key things an enterprise needs to do to succeed at the onset of this brave new AI world.

They include diving into AI with a business-driven mindset, taking a people-centric approach, getting your proprietary data ready, investing in a sustainable tech foundation, accelerating ecosystem innovation, and levelling up your responsible AI.