Five Areas to Harness the Potential of Generative AI

A year ago, people and organizations were just beginning to imagine how to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into their organizations. This year, those ideas are becoming a reality, and more and more companies are moving from planning to execution and implementation of this technology.

This time, I would like to share five areas in which organizations are using generative

artificial intelligence to innovate and – especially – make their organizations more productive, but before we get into it, it is necessary to make a note of a what do we mean by generative AI, this being the subset of AI whose objective is to create new content (text, images, music, audio, videos, code, etc.) from pre-existing data.

1. Writing agents

Employees at companies, large or small, can rely on writing agents to support them in creating complete email drafts or perfecting the writing of an internal newsletter proposal, revising the tone of a report or simply translating a document. Thinking exclusively about small and medium-sized companies, where the tasks to be done are many and the people to attend to them are few, a writing agent is capable of saving time and streamlining processes.

However, large organizations, such as Rotoplas, a water solutions company, are also

beginning to use generative AI agents to support their collaborators in writing documents and emails, as well as intelligently completing information in spreadsheets, increasing people's productivity.

For those interested in exploring this area of support, here are some helpful tips to make your experience with writing agents more useful and faster. Among them: using natural language; being clear and concise; providing context; using specific and relevant keywords; and breaking down complex tasks into separate prompts.

2. Information analysis

Through optical character recognition (OCR) solutions, a technology that allows handwritten,mprinted or text located in images to be converted into machine language, there are retail organizations such as Mercado Libre that use it as document processors to analyze information and automate the credit risk evaluation in its Mercado Crédito service, and for fraud prevention. The capacity of generative AI behind OCR has the objective not only of recognizing text, but also of understanding, organizing, and enriching it to provide valuable information contributions to the organizations that use it.

3. Code support

For development teams of technology companies, digital native startups or for the IT teams of organizations, they can take advantage of the ability of these assistants to complete their code as they write, generate functions or complete blocks of code on demand. Likewise, through generative AI there are solutions that include a chat in common language where developers can ask the AI questions about programming or to receive guidance on  recommended practices. In fact, we implemented this technology for a group of developers within the company and found that the teams completed their common development tasks 40% faster and spent 55% less time writing new code.

Through this technology, developers can make large-scale changes to their entire code base with a single message, including adding new features, updating dependencies between files, assisting with version upgrades, or performing full code reviews.

4. Increase cybersecurity

Cybercrime is growing both in quantity and quality of attacks. In a comparison between 2022 and 2023 conducted by CrowdStrike, 76% more organizations were affected by cybercrime.

Mostly, successful attacks began through phishing or credential theft, seemingly insignificant details but which reinforce the “defense dilemma,” which says that attackers only need a novel and successful threat to break the best defenses, while defenders must deploy the best protections at all times.

Incorporating generative AI into organizations' cybersecurity strategies is particularly well suited to reduce (and possibly eliminate) tasks and help empower defenders through natural language instruction. But in particular it has the potential to help organizations identify and respond to threat alerts faster, have the ability to analyze and explain with speed up the behavior of potentially malicious code, as well as provide recommendations for remediation of events. This frees cybersecurity teams from lower-priority tasks to focus on further strengthening defenses.

5. Customer service agents

Through generative artificial intelligence agents, companies can integrate customer service agents capable of interacting comfortably with people, helping customers to interact with brands more fluidly, particularly it has been observed that their greatest impact is in web sectors, mobile devices, call centers and points of sale, as well as through multiple modalities such as text messages, voice and more.

These five areas are just a few examples of how generative AI is transforming organizations today. As technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative applications that drive productivity, efficiency and creativity across all sectors.

Importantly, generative AI is not a magic bullet. To be effective, it must be implemented in a strategic and responsible manner, taking into account the specific needs and objectives of the organization. It is also important to have the right tools and resources to ensure that generative AI is used ethically and safely.

However, the possibilities offered by this technology are big. Those organizations that are able to harness their potential will find themselves in a privileged position to lead the way into the future of innovation.