Generative AI at work — How to master human-machine collaboration (Part 2)
In the first part of this series, we looked at the influence that generative AI can have on the people within your organization. Now, we’re going to turn the tables and look at the impact that it can have on your IT systems, applications, and ways of working.
Part 2: The IT perspective
Making collaboration easier in the age of hybrid working: One of the challenges of hybrid working (a combination of office and remote work) is to stay up-to-date on the status of the tasks that your colleagues are working on. It requires finding a balance to avoid spending productive time in endless video meetings. Fortunately, generative AI’s ability to summarize documents can be a powerful and helpful tool. It allows you to current with the reading materials that your colleagues are sending, without having to dedicate all your time to it. This kind of tool helps you catch up more easily with your colleagues’ work to stay up-to-date and smoothly collaborate at a distance without having to meet too often.
ChatGPT can also act as a virtual personal assistant. It helps you schedule meetings by scanning everyone’s agenda and automatically finding an appropriate time, sending reminders and writing simple emails. It can also handle other routine communication tasks, allowing you and your colleagues to focus on more complex and meaningful interactions.
Efficiently browsing through a vast sea of information: In the Digital Age, every company sits on a vast library of knowledge that has been accumulating year after year. This seemingly boundless digital library is a precious source of information that remains hard to navigate, and thus mostly untouched. Therefore, many problems that could be solved and many questions that could be answered inside a company, remain unaddressed.
With generative AI, you can now easily provide a pre-trained generative AI agent with all the documents ever produced by your organization to use as a private knowledge source. You can then create a chatbot or digital agent to serve as the virtual archivist of your organization. Whenever a colleague or a customer asks a question you don’t have the answer to, you can just forward it to the archivist. The archivist will then generate an answer automatically, providing links to the appropriate documentation. As a result, your need to contact the right expert will significantly decrease, allowing experts to focus on their field of knowledge rather than wasting their time answering the same questions over and over again.
Five IT must-haves to adopt AI
To capitalize on these advancements, IT departments must establish clear AI adoption policies. These include:
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- Prioritizing security and privacy: With increased reliance on AI, ensuring data security and privacy must be the top priority. More on that below.
- Streamlining data management: Breaking down data silos and ensuring data quality will be critical for AI algorithms to function effectively.
- Upskilling the workforce: Training and reskilling employees to leverage AI-enabled tools will be key to driving productivity gains.
- Encouraging collaboration: Promote cross-functional collaboration to share insights and best practices on AI implementation.
- Embracing agility: Adopting an agile mindset will enable organizations to stay ahead in the ever-evolving AI landscape.
By implementing these policies, IT departments can set the stage for a successful AI-driven transformation, ensuring that businesses are ready to embrace the power of AI in productivity and collaboration tools.
You get what you pay for: Either with money or data
One other caveat to always bear in mind when it comes to using generative AI: Remember, if you're not paying for a service with money, you're likely paying with your data. Be conscious of this trade-off when using AI tools and always be sure to read the fine-print, as demonstrated below.
Clearly, you cannot simply turn your IT teams loose with a paid subscription to ChatGPT, Bing Chat or other publicly available generative AI tools. These types of tools use the inputs you provide to train their models, so unless you are careful, your internal training documents, operating procedures or any other competitive information could become public. In fact, since its launch, ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most problematic sources of shadow IT.
Fortunately, Microsoft offers a way for enterprises to securely integrate OpenAI’s thousands of pre-trained models for their own use. Once deployed, they become your organization’s private models, supplied with your private training material, and is hosted on a secure, dedicated Microsoft Azure instance created for your organization. Of course, this is not a journey you should embark on alone.
Don't turn your IT teams loose with a public AI tool, unless you want your information to become public. There are secure ways to integrate generative AI, but it’s not a journey to take alone.
The value of working with a provider
Digital workplace managed services providers play a key role in adopting and implementing new AI-based solutions that are aligned with your business goals. They can help you securely deploy generative AI agents, making sure that you remain compliant, addressing data privacy concerns and ensuring the responsible use of this technology within your organization.
Furthermore, a qualified provider can develop comprehensive solutions that combine collaboration, communication and productivity tools. They should also be able to offer the necessary infrastructure and resources to support generative AI algorithms. When choosing a provider, consider whether they have the capacity to handle your computing power and storage requirements, in order to ensure that the solution can meet your performance and scalability needs. The right provider will be able to manage required the infrastructure upgrades and maintenance, providing you with a comprehensive solution.
Finally, they can help you set up best practices for human and AI collaboration, making sure that you get all the benefits from this breed of new conversational agents.
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By Janusz Marcinkowski, Digital Workplace Innovation Consultant
Posted on: August 1, 2023
