From family dinners to weekend afternoons, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last six months playing around with generative-AI tools and thinking about how they will change “everything.” I’m more and more certain that they will have an impact, but it won’t be as enormous or as fast as some might think, particularly in the enterprise.
Generative-AI systems, by contrast, are not good at rigorously and consistently executing the same task over and over again with high precision. Ask a generative-AI system similar but not identical questions and you may get wildly different answers. This kind of variance breaks business processes built on input consistency.
A great example of this comes from the early era of web commerce. It was quickly possible to build web-based store fronts and accept credit-card payments. However, shipping and packaging was built and optimized for a world of pallet-sized deliveries to shops. To the extent that companies even had digital catalogs, they didn’t have pictures of products. No supervisor of a grocery store needs to know what a can of soup looks like. They already know. They’re in the store every day.