A new survey from Upwork validates a lot of my thinking – AI is about augmentation, not replacement. A study of 1,400 business leaders from Upwork found that 64% of C-suite respondents said generative AI will lead them to hire “more professionals of all types.” The Upwork report also noted a disconnect around AI between different rungs of the corporate ladder. Around 73% of C-suite executives said their companies were embracing generative AI “compared to only 54% of VPs, 52% of directors, and 53% of senior managers.”
Also validating this – is Gartner. Even considering AI, 81% of large enterprise CIOs plan to increase headcount in 2023.
OpenAI announced the general availability of GPT-4, making it available to everyone on the waitlist and broadly to new developers by month’s end.
And let’s hit three use cases.
Google’s medical AI chatbot is already in the field for testing – the Wall Street Journal reports that the Mayo Clinic has been using Med-PaLM 2 since April.
Another interesting use case in Wired – is assistive technologies integrating AI to help describe objects and people to those with visual impairment.
Finally, one to consider: The Pentagon. The Department of Defense is running several trials, as reported in Bloomberg. The focus is on developing data integration and digital platforms across the military designed to help with data collection. And if you want to explore the critical issue of trust, I’ll link to a NextGov piece on that.
Why do we care?
The Pentagon model of trials and running exercises is insightful. That’s an organization with evident and understandable data privacy concerns, and its approach is easy to model with customers. Thematically, augmentation seems to be the best use case – helping people, not replacing them. Have those conversations with customers.