GenAI is already changing business – and it’s only the beginning

Survey after survey points to companies intending to increase their investments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) but what are the practical applications for this enormously powerful technology? What uses is it being put to beyond illicit college essay composition? Will it be a destroyer of jobs, as many fear, or a creator of new ones, as others hope?

What is GenAI?

GenAI is a subfield of artificial intelligence that takes existing AI one step further, says Eoin O’Reilly, head of AI and data analytics at EY Ireland: it can create new content and processes, based on advanced algorithms and deep learning techniques, to analyse patterns in existing data and generate new outputs.

“GenAI and large language models offer incredible potential to act as a ‘co-pilot’ for people, augmenting human potential by supporting ideation and research, boosting productivity, automating repetitive tasks and much more,” says O’Reilly.

Business and GenAI

What’s so impressive is the pace of the progress in this space, says Ailbhe McDarby, senior proposition manager, UCaaS and CCaaS, at BT.

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“GenAI came to the consciousness of the technology world in late 2022 and to the public about six months later, by which time BT and its partners had already turned what was a nascent technology into products our customers could consume.

“In my opinion, truly intelligent virtual agents are the first great leap forward. The first iteration of voice bots was all well and good but you had to put on your clearest voice to make it understand you and with my ‘very Irish’ accent – as once described to me by an American – it didn’t always work.”

With GenAI and the natural language understanding it creates, you can answer with a Dublin “yeah” rather than a clipped “yes”, says McDarby.

“You can also programme the responses to be in Jamaican, Scottish or another accent of your choice, dependent on the market you serve,” she adds. “This sounds trivial but makes the technology much more usable in the real world.”

Taking or creating jobs?

GenAI will replace some jobs and create others, McDarby predicts. “Let’s take the contact centre as an example,” she says. “It is already replacing jobs but jobs that businesses couldn’t keep staff in. This was low-paid, tough work and agents were getting a hard time at the end of the phone.

“Analysts think that the reduction in jobs that the likes of IVA/bots will trigger is likely offset by how companies will expand their customer services capability. What humans can do is empathise. No machine can ever truly do that and so humans will always be needed for nuance, complexity and empathy.

“AI is going to be like a coach for our employees of the future. So ultimately the staff retained in a company should be higher paid, dealing with more complex and interesting issues, and have a defined career path.”

Gen AI and Ireland

Ireland has been and continues to be an important hub for foreign direct investment (FDI) and for companies that specialise in technology, cyber, digital and AI, says O’Reilly.

“Ireland is a trusted location for doing business with access to top-class talent and universities, and we differentiate from other locations across digital and AI in our ability to communicate effectively, collaborate and be creative,” he says.

“While disruption always comes with every new major technological evolution, each of these evolutions has always created many more jobs in the long run. We see GenAI acting in the same way, with large language models and tools like EYQ or ChatGPT working alongside our teams and assisting in the completion of routine or complex jobs, thereby freeing up time for people to focus on more productive and higher-value tasks and, most crucially, enabling more human interactions.”

Gen AI in the future

And, of course, we are only in the foothills of the GenAI roll-out, as McDarby says: “As more and more businesses move to the cloud, they will take advantage of what GenAI can do for them.

“We see GenAI giving more insight to businesses in the future, making them more efficient. But the real tangible benefit will be for us, consumers. The days of being frustrated and hanging around on hold for 45 minutes or being passed around explaining our issue three times over are soon to be gone – and it’s mostly thanks to the capability that GenAI will bring to the call centre.”