Driving Real Business Value With Generative AI For SMBs And Beyond

Generative AI offers significant potential for SMBs, but strategic alignment across people, processes, and data security is key to maximizing business value.

It’s no secret that generative artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous economic potential—McKinsey & Company projected that the benefits could total over $4.4 trillion in value for the global economy. But the dust is still settling after a frenzy of companies investing heavily in generative AI, and many are finding that ROI remains elusive.

Unsurprisingly, technology teams have been eager to experiment with various proof of concepts (POCs). But as Ben Schreiner, Head of AI and Modern Data Strategy Business Development at AWS, notes “The real sticking point has been getting POCs into production. This is partly because large language models (LLMs) are the Swiss army knives of technology—a tool capable of so many different tasks.” With such a huge scope of applications across product development, customer experiences, and much more, what makes generative AI so exciting is ironically what has stopped companies from getting the most value out of it.

“Many have struggled to focus on working backwards from a real business problem. Even once they’ve uncovered a well-defined business use case, failure to build internal alignment stunts ROI. To make investments pay off, a paradigm shift is needed,” Schreiner adds. His recommendation for driving generative AI’s revenue potential? “Companies of all sizes should pursue a purposeful strategy encompassing employees, business processes, and customers.”

Value Driver #1: Augment Your People

As the saying goes, time is money. From writing emails faster to automating menial tasks, the value lift of improving employee productivity is undeniable. But as Schreiner points out, “You can’t reach new levels of efficiency if your people feel uncomfortable about generative AI. Any barrier to adoption will be a barrier to business outcomes.” According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, employees’ top three concerns about AI were that it needs human insight (32 percent), it can provide incorrect information (29 percent), and that it will cause job losses (27 percent).[…]