What changes can we expect in our organizations from the widespread adherence to Artificial Intelligence resources?

Access to high-quality information has always been a factor for differentiation and competitive advantage across groups, organizations, and even governments. The difference between an entity that holds information and another that does not ultimately causes an important gap in terms of analytical and decision-making capabilities and opportunities.

We have been able to see the importance data knowledge plays in the competition between different groups, such as, for instance, during the two great world wars. The information flow, the use of encryption, and the extreme concern about information confidentiality were determining factors and had a major impact on the outcome of the war itself.

It is obvious that impact is also found in organizations. Having a good benchmark, knowing competitors’ numbers, among so many other pieces of information, are factors that enable that gap compared to the competition. On the other hand, with the advance of technology, access to information has become a lot easier over time and, therefore, largely democratized across all companies, in all different market segments. As such, there has been a levelling off that narrowed the gap considerably and, consequently, the competitive advantages between organizations. Hence people’s specialization in Data Analysis, data scientists – amongst other roles that have become very relevant in this new context. Such happens because the new gap lies in the data analysis capability organizations have, and their capacity to convert those analyses into value.

Once the Technology area follows up closely the major market shifts, our society has found in Artificial Intelligence a very adequate means to bring part of the creative and decision-making process to automated solutions. Autonomous systems that are able to work data in raw form and that, through the training of machine learning systems, manage to bring solutions with value to organizations and, at the same time, make the whole process a lot more agile.

It is obvious that for those technologies to be possible the general context must be prepared to them. In this sense, the fact we currently have extraordinary volumes of systematized information, retrievable through computer systems that already have adequate processing capabilities, ultimately enabled the use of Artificial Intelligence in global scales. This context allowed the way we interact with those systems to undergo a meaningful change, from mere data queries to automated systems that receive problem descriptions and the answer already is the proposed solution based on a whole extraordinary historic base.

An example of Artificial Intelligence that made that change is ChatGPT, which offers us access to a textual web-based application that works by receiving the exposure of a request to solve a problem and the system responds with the most correct solution it finds. The great difference is that the question is not posed to obtain information, but rather for a work that so far could only be done by people. Therefore, when organizations manage to align those new resources to their companies’ particular contexts, they will enjoy way above-average agility, compared to their competitors.

The age of information, which aimed at data access, has now changed its focus to the direct search for solutions and recommendations. The role professionals play, at this new moment, is to monitor the process and perform any adjustments in training and configuring those environments.

Another relevant aspect to be considered is the volume of requests served by this new model. It is not limited by the associate/hour factor, which allows this volume to have practically infinite scale. Serving those requests without the use of Artificial Intelligence would only be possible with specialized teams.

In this context, it is up to humans to know what is the best way to elaborate the questions and to know each resource’s capabilities, in addition to knowing how to perform the combination between the various frameworks made available by the players in the technology area.

We may imagine those are the prototypes of automated software that will be increasingly more present in our lives. Nowadays, having an automated system at hand, and one that is aligned to our business strategies, has become the new gap between organizations. Here, the goal is to bring a relevant subject in a way we may decide to explore the new opportunity and prepare to remain competitive in this new Age of Artificial Intelligence.

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Mauricio Pontuschka is Senior Partner and CTO at Blue Management Institute. He is also member of the executive committee at Bossa.etc, Afferolab and Peoplecraft. Pontuschka has a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Mackenzie, PhD in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP, postdoc fellowship from INPE, and specialization from Harvard Business School. Former Head of PUC-SP Computing Area. Currently a member of ITA research group in robotics applied to aerospace. He has published scientific papers in international magazines such as the Journal of Physics and IntechOpen.

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