Using Gen()AI (GENAI)

This guide provides strategic insights into effectively managing GenAI, focusing on fostering innovation and productivity while adapting to the evolving technology landscape.

Executive Summary (TL;DR)

Managing GenAI effectively requires a strategic approach that aligns with your business operations and culture. Two primary methods are discussed: the task-focused approach and the solution-focused approach. The task-focused approach involves analyzing tasks performed by your company's employees and identifying opportunities for AI assistance or automation. The solution-focused approach, on the other hand, involves identifying the needs of your teams and exploring how GenAI can address these needs.

Strategy

The strategy for using Generative AI can be broken down into several categories based on how it might be considered. It is first important to consider value generation,

Value Generation

There are several strategic methods for incorporating GenAI into teams and organizations. We break it down into task focused approach, a solution focused approach and a more diverse wild-west-approach. In some instances it may be useful to consider all strategic approaches, and both time and scale will help understand more efficient strategies.

Task-Focused Approach

A task-focused approach breaks down an employee's efforts into individual tasks to identify patterns that can be effectively augmented with GenAI. The general approach follows the following steps:

1. Break down the jobs of your company's employees into individual tasks. See examples.
2. Identify potential for AI assistance or automation for each task using tools such as supervised learning or generative AI.
3. Estimate the value of automating each task, considering factors such as potential time or resource savings, and the ethical implications of doing so. See ethical considerations.
4. Decide whether to build or buy the necessary AI tools, and calculate the costs of automating the tasks. See building or buying guide.
5. Prepare to govern the use of AI in your operations. See governing guide.

Solution-Focused Approach

A solution focused approach considers business needs and what needs to be acccomplished to meet those busineess needs. Implementing a solution-focused approach involves the following steps:

1. Engage your teams in discussions about how they would like to utilize GenAI, considering different examples of its use. See examples.
2. Understand the common use-cases required by your various employees and teams.
3. Decide whether to build or buy the necessary AI tools. See building or buying guide.
4. Ensure your efforts align with the important ethical considerations of using GenAI. See ethical considerations.
5. Prepare to manage the use of AI in your operations. See managing guide.
6. Learn how to mark your, and detect others', AI-generated content. See marking and detecting guide.

Wild-west Approach

A 'wild-west' approach involves allowing individual teams and developers to work on their own use-cases and needs so that their problems may be more effectivel solved on reasonable timescales and timelines. While there may be different manners and methods of achieving similar results, detailed nuances may be built into their solutions that are hard to immediately incorporate in general solutions. When there are solutions that are found that may share a high-degree of similarity or overlap, it will be economical to consolidate components of those solutions, including components such as LLM computation, back ends and orchestration frameworks, and front-ends.

This 'strategy' has the benefits of potentially providing immediate solutions, as well as allowing competitive selection of optimal solutions, it is generally not possible in smaller organizations or teams, and more collaborative strategies will likely be necessary to maintain efficiency and coherence over time.