Not all new technology waves are the same. Some waves are vertical (3D printing, digital twins, blockchain) while others are horizontal (the PC in the 80s, the Web in the 90s). GenAI is a horizontal wave. The question is not if GenAI will impact my business, but what will be the scope of this impact. In this talk, we will go through a journey of collisions: GenAI colliding with customer service, clerical work, information search, content production, IT development, product design, and other knowledge work. A common thread to understand the impact of GenAI is to distinguish between descriptive use cases (search, summarize, expand, transcribe & translate) versus creative use.

1. How GenAI will (not)
change your business
Marlon Dumas
Professor @ University of Tartu
Chief Product Officer @ Apromore
sTARTUp Day – January 25, 2024

2. GenAI is not
(only) hype!
• Question-answering & semantic search
• Like search engines but find associations between concepts
• Find concepts most related to a question and stitch them together as
an answer
• Complete & expand
• Give an executive summary in a prompt, get the introduction
• Give instructions, get an email
• Expand a text or key bullet-points, write boilerplate text
• Tag & summarize
• Find key “entities” in text, image, videos – more flexible than classic
entity recognition
• Generate summary from collections of documents
• Translate & transform
• From one natural language to another
• From natural language to software code
• From text to image, image to text, voice to text, …
• From instructions to (product) designs

3. GenAI will
affect many
businesses
• Customer Service
• Expect radical levels of automation!
• Productivity boost, service quality enhancement
• Content Production
• Content marketing won’t look the same!
• Journalism is already not the same.
• Big risk of information bubbles
• IT Development
• Coding assistants to boost developer productivity
• Work will shift to analysis & design, understanding users & use
• Education
• As an educator, if your students embrace it before you, you’re in
trouble!
• Product design
• Exploration tasks to be automated: pharmaceutical, materials, …
• Knowledge work
• Automation of simpler cases in legal & business consultancy
• Healthcare
• Not yet, due to safety & regulatory concerns

4. Network Effects:
The main reason why
GenAI will change your
business is because it will
change your clients’
business, your suppliers’
business and your
competitors’ business
4

5. 2024 is 1998 again!
1998 – The Web becomes strategic
What’s our Web strategy?
How are our e-commerce & self-service
channels doing?
How’re our Web marketing & sales campaigns
doing?
How is our new Intranet coming along? Is it
boosting productivity?
How’s our Web-based CRM and ERP doing?
2024 – AI becomes strategic
What’s our AI strategy?
How are our GenAI customer service channels
doing?
How are our AI-powered marketing & sales
campaigns doing?
How is our AI content management system
coming along? Is it boosting productivity?
How much value are we leveraging from AI in our
CRM & ERP?
150 million Web
users
> 250-500 million
GenAI users (excl.
smartphone assistants)

6. The GenAI Hype is boosting all AI
Robotic Systems
• Domestic robots / smart homes
• Surveillance systems
• Autonomous vehicles
Natural Language Processing
• Question-answering systems
• Content robots
• Machine translation
Virtual Assistants
• Chatbots
• Recommender systems
• Task automation bots
Automated Decision Systems
• Predictive & prescriptive monitoring
• Dynamic pricing
• Credit scoring / underwriting
• Medical diagnosis / precision medicine
All things machine
learning!

7. Beware, mind the limitations!
7
https://towardsdatascience.com/human-interpretable-machine-learning-part-1-the-need-and-importance-of-model-interpretation-2ed758f5f476

8. What won’t
change
• Critical thinking
• The longer an LLM goes on, the more likely to hallucinate
• Best LLMs can solve “theory of mind” tasks at the level of a 7-
years-old child, unreliably, probably just brute force
• Figuring out I am wrong is my biggest asset!
• Creative curiosity
• Figuring out when you need to be different and how?
• Figuring out what else we should do, what should we stop doing?
• Responsiveness & adaptability
• Recognizing and dealing with exceptions
• Figuring out that something has changed fundamentally, adapting
to new realities
• “Owning” our decisions

9. Expect a lot
out of GenAI,
but don’t
expect it to
replace your
creativity!
9
Image generated by DALL-E via a ChatGPT prompt

10. Levels of AI
10
• A – Brute force, use heaps of data,
optimize to death trying “all”
moves, with some pruning
• incl. combinatorial optimization, machine
learning, deep learning
• B - Selective optimization based on
trial-and-error and/or human input.
• Incl. Reinforcement learning, active learning
• C – Augmented Intelligence
• Humans & machines complementing each
other, learning from each other
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/10/heres_what_garry_kaspa
rov_an_old_world_chess_champion_thinks_of_ai/

11. We’re just mid-way!
11
Last 50 years
• Accuracy
• Automation
• Scalability
Next 50 years
• Reliability
• Explainability
• Trustworthiness