What Counts as a Win with Gen AI?

August 22, 2024

Written by Eric Krapf, General Manager and Program Co-Chair, Enterprise Connect Publisher

Last week the tech world mourned the death of Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy, and paste commands. Many social media accounts paid tribute to Tesler by simply copying and pasting the headline announcing his death, a clever way to honor someone—by using his innovation and thereby demonstrating just how significant it is. Cut, copy, and paste is so fundamental to how we work that we take it for granted. But it really is one of the great productivity tools of the computer age.

The occasion reminded me, though, of how old-school journalists used to feel about cut-and-paste. Believe it or not, they didn’t like it. I was in journalism school in the mid-1980s, and many of our teachers hated the idea that it would become easy to rearrange your copy. What if, they asked, you’re out on an assignment and you have to phone a story into the rewrite desk (drawing from the pocketful of quarters you were instructed to carry at all times, to feed into payphones)? You’d be dictating your story over the phone to the editors in the office, composing it as you talked. You can’t cut-and-paste text in that situation. Cut-and-paste would make reporters lazy thinkers and writers, they insisted.

All of this also made me think about our expectations around AI features’ ability to drive productivity. Cut-and-paste demonstrates that the most impactful productivity innovations are often the simplest. Everyone, in the course of putting their ideas into words, encounters the need to rearrange those ideas to make their point clearer. And of course copy-and-paste does even more: It lets you easily move chunks of text from one setting to another. Reuse and sharing are a major source of efficiency and collaboration in almost all work contexts.

So what similar functions can Generative AI solve for—where does it really produce efficiencies for a broad set of users? Writing code and boilerplate-level text seems to be a killer app, though in both cases, users have to invest more time than they likely bargained for at first, given the need to carefully vet the AI’s work before sending it into production. Imagine if that were the case with cut-and-paste—having to re-read every paragraph you pasted into place to make sure that all the words made it to their destination exactly as they left their previous location.

In the contact center, call summarization has been the leading use case—another pretty straightforward application buried deep within the business processes, far from the critical eye of the customer. That makes it applicable for most agent call scenarios and promises time savings that help with the ROI case.

The problem has been that un-cool applications like call summarization just don’t satisfy the hype-driven hunger that’s raged through the industry for almost 2 years now. With previous generations of technologies, IT folks looked for the quick wins, but with Gen AI, that approach seemed unambitious.

This tug-of-war between quick wins and transformative ambitions will be the focus of one of our breakout sessions at Enterprise Connect AI in Santa Clara, CA, Oct. 1 – 2. Mitch Lieberman of Fidelity Investments will lead a session entitled, How Do I Make Strategic AI Investments Today? in which he’ll address some of the key issues:

• Do I need to prepare to build an AI infrastructure and also buy applications?
• Is it even possible to change my mind in a year, once I’ve committed to an AI strategy?
• Investments are large, so what is the business case?
• Is hedging my bets the right choice, or do I need to go all in?
• Dealing with the fact that technology buying decisions are cyclical and typically go for 3-5 years, but not all of them happen at the same time: CRM, Sales, Service, Contact Center, Productivity - all will have AI and an AI cost.

I hope you can join us for 2 days of straight talk and realistic conversations about how to use AI in your enterprise. Sign up now; our best rates end next week. I’ll see you in Santa Clara!