If you aren’t using GenAI daily, get out of the way!

Leaders, you must equip yourself with a personal and daily understanding of the capabilities of generative AI (GenAI) or risk making decisions about the future of your business based on understanding technologies of the past. Too few of you have a hands-on, experience-based understanding of what GenAI can do and the risks and obstacles you should consider and are instead relying on third-party interpretations.

Making business decisions without knowing GenAI is like ignoring the internet because you aren’t used to it yet

If you haven’t used or experimented with GenAI technology first-hand, you risk approaching decision making on live projects only through the lens of technologies and solutions you already know. Imagine designing your go-to-market strategy and ignoring the internet because you haven’t used it yourself enough to be comfortable yet. That’s where we hear many enterprise leaders are today regarding GenAI. This lack of understanding points to an emerging and urgent need for training and rethinking our ways of working in response to the rise of GenAI.

There is further evidence of this in an informal LinkedIn poll (see Exhibit 1) we conducted at the beginning of September 2023. It provides a 91-person snapshot of GenAI posterchild ChatGPT’s current use and reveals that just one in four of us use ChatGPT in our daily work. Another 18% use it at least once a week—but nearly half (45%) just dabble now and then. Worse still, 12% are already bored with it or see little value, suggesting they haven’t had good guidance in creating value.

Exhibit 1: Executives need more first-hand experience with GenAI tools like ChatGPT

Sample: LinkedIn poll conducted by HFS Research, Q3 2023, n=91
Source: HFS Research, 2023

The survey cohort is those who follow my LinkedIn posts, so, given my usual output, the result is likely to skew toward early adopters of emerging tech. The results are likely to be worse among average enterprise leaders.

The real value is in using tools like ChatGPT to augment daily activities. You must drive this daily usage into ways of working, such as by demanding widespread training in using prompts or communicating the expectations and limitations of what GenAI can achieve. But critically, you must lead by example and integrate such tools into your daily activities.

Until you do, you risk plowing on with current programs without full knowledge of the opportunities available for leaping forward, and you might be too influenced by screaming banner headlines.

The faster you get to grips with the basics, the quicker you will be able to take on the hard yards of building the Generative Enterprise™

We hear from our regular industry-spanning conversations about GenAI that popular media influences business leaders to worry more, and more often, about hallucination and data security than they need to. Spend more time using and understanding GenAI to ground yourself in reality—beyond the hype, euphoria, and hysteria. With this understanding, you will be better placed to move forward with the hard yards of transforming your organization and tackling roadmaps for data use, technology, governance, and processes.

You will have to think through how work gets done, what you want humans and machines to do, and where humans and machines need to work together. Successful transformation will demand changes in attitudes and behaviors among teams and forming new considerations about how you value humans’ input and when and how GenAI should support and augment them.

Three steps to leap the S-curve with GenAI—and the first step is all about you

To leap the S-curve in value that the Generative Enterprise can deliver (see Exhibit 2), leaders must

1. Learn the technology, personally and viscerally.
2. Deploy the technology, detailing plans for technology, data, privacy, security, and governance.
3. Lead people change in partnership with the technology, working out how and where work should be done by people augmented by machines, machines only, people only, and machines augmented by people.

The second and third steps are challenging. Approaching either without completing the first step restricts your vision, inhibits ambition, and constrains goal setting.

Exhibit 2: The Generative Enterprise inspires a new S-curve of value creation

Source: HFS Research, 2023

The Bottom Line: Develop your GenAI muscle, or your decision making—and your business—will get stuck in the past.

Exploring and using GenAI tools as part of your daily activities is where your necessary experience and understanding begin—it’s your due diligence. The journey to the HFS Research Generative Enterprise is not easy, but it starts with your understanding. You need to develop your GenAI muscle memory to begin seeing the future through today’s technology rather than persisting with a view constructed on your experience and knowledge of the technology of the past.