Proceed With Caution

The Promise and Peril of Generative AI in the Workplace.

30-Second Pitch

Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude are all the rage, but how can we balance the pros and cons of generative AI in the workplace? 

Overview

For decades, AI has fascinated tech leaders, academics, management gurus, policymakers, and think tanks. Despite their differing viewpoints, both prophets and naysayers have asked the same fundamental question: When will it arrive in earnest?

As it turns out, the answer was November 30, 2022. On that day, OpenAI publicly released a souped-up version of ChatGPT, a previously obscure text-generation tool. Its underlying engine represented a quantum leap over its predecessor—and it went viral. Within a mere five days, well over one million people had signed up.

No aspect will remain unaffected.

And like that, the world had shifted. Google’s management declared an internal code red. Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Amazon, and scores of other software vendors quickly began incorporating AI into their wares. The market cap of chipmaker Nvidia surpassed $1 trillion and then four times as much. Technical terms such as natural language processing, prompt engineering, and large language models entered the zeitgeist.

Predicting what comes next is impossible, but generative AI will only become vastly more powerful in the coming years. Society is clearly experiencing a Promethean moment. No aspect will remain unaffected.

As I write in The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace, the workplace will probably experience the most profound changes. This new crop of tools promises to improve employee productivity, save firms’ payroll, combat labor shortages, discover hidden insights, and much more. At the same time, though, the significant perils around their transparency, legality, security, privacy, and inability to separate fact from fiction should give any responsible person pause.

In this talk rife with case studies, data, and examples, I cut through the considerable AI bullshit. I offer a much-needed balanced viewpoint to the dizzying hype around these newfangled tchotchkes. I explain why firms should tread lightly when adopting rapidly evolving generative AI tools that even their creators don’t fully understand.

What Attendees Will Learn

In this one-hour talk, I answer the following questions:

• What are the major benefits of generative AI?
• What are the different buckets of AI tools?
• Which specific tools seem to be the most promising?
• Who are the early AI adopters, and what can they teach us from their successes and failures?
• What are the inherent downsides and limitations of generative AI at work?
• How can organizations maximize its pros while minimizing its cons?
• Where do we go from here?

And more.

Next Steps

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