Imaginative executives wanted Imaginative executives wanted Deloitte Insights
https://www2.deloitte.com/ 12-23
The motivational poster has gone from mere corporate clich to its own category of meme, but one overused aphorism may reclaim its stature as an enterprise imperative: We’re only limited by our imagination.
While you might have heard the saying before, teams and organizations have always been bound by limiting factors. They don’t have enough data or the right data. Leadership is skeptical. Or, most dreaded of all: “That won’t move the needle.”
But
in a generative AI world, imagination truly is the only limit. It’s now possible to create constant streams of content, identify new operational efficiencies, or scan regulatory filings or customer reviews in minutes. Now the only question is, what do you want to know?
Asking better questions will become a crucial skillset in enterprises that have adopted generative AI. This trend may create demand for a new type of leader, one that is driven more by creativity than we’ve seen in the past. The past 20 years or so have seen leaders rewarded for steering their organizations based on data and insights, rather than gut and instinct. But the next few years could see more imaginative leaders leap ahead. Give an image generator a boring prompt, and it will produce a boring picture. The same is true of generative AI applications at the enterprise level. Unimaginative use cases produce limited impact. As more businesses attempt to differentiate themselves from their competition, leaders who can find creative new applications for generative AI may separate themselves from their peers who are busy just following data.
This isn’t to say that data-driven decision-making will become pass. In fact, it will be as important as ever, if not more so. But the definition of what it means to be data-driven may change because the range of data that leaders can access will increase, thanks to generative AI. So much of an enterprise’s data is buried in natural language text files, machine logs, and, increasingly, intelligent products.
32 Generative AI gives organizations the ability to make sense of this digital exhaust. The creative leader will understand what these oft-overlooked data sources have to say about their business and will use generative AI to ask intelligent questions of the data sources. And they will ask these questions at the speed of thought, rather than waiting for their weekly report.
But all that barely scratches the surface of generative AI’s full range of likely impacts. We’re pretty sure it’s going to be seismic. We just don’t know exactly where the ground will shift the most.