From chatbots to AI Agents
The adoption of AI agents has faced significant challenges in the enterprise. Businesses face hurdles such as the need for internal expertise, data complexity, and potential risks like intellectual property leakage. Skepticism about AI’s immediate productivity benefits and implications for job quality and output can also hinder further adoption.
Generative AI has emerged as a transformative technology that reshapes how businesses operate and interact with customers. To harness this technology effectively, it’s essential to understand current applications, limitations, and future potential to grasp how it will impact the business landscape in the coming years.
How did business get started with AI?
The journey of generative AI in business began with early adopters of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This was one of the first areas where generative AI made an impact, with businesses using it for content creation, translation, and sentiment analysis. Companies also started exploring the potential of generative AI in image and video creation, using it for marketing, design, and entertainment purposes. Generative AI also found its way into data augmentation and synthetic data generation, helping businesses train machine learning models more effectively.
As generative AI technologies matured, businesses began incorporating them into customer-facing applications like chatbots. These AI-powered conversational interfaces have become increasingly common, allowing companies to provide round-the-clock customer support and streamline routine interactions. Chatbots have delivered mixed results, with the limited ability to handle basic interactions but still relying on a human-in-the-loop to fulfil more complex requests. However, the recent advancements around large language models (LLMs) challenge what we thought the limits of automation were.
What new generative AI technology is on the horizon for businesses?
What if you could hire an employee who never slept, worked 24/7, and never complained or filed sick? Short of a few human rights violations, the next best thing would be this quickly evolving technology known as AI agents. AI agents are the successor to the LLM chatbots we’ve seen today. They can automate complex tasks that require reasoning, enhance decision-making, and enable new forms of value creation.
AI agents are more versatile and adaptable than chatbots which were designed for specific, narrow tasks. Agents can be trained to perform various functions across various industries, from content creation and data analysis to process automation and decision support. As businesses begin to recognize the potential of AI agents, we are seeing a surge in investment and experimentation.
To describe the overall effect this upcoming wave of AI agents could have on businesses, we refer to “Total factor productivity” (TFP). TFP is a recent term coined by Tinbergen (1942) that describes increases in economic output that cannot be attributed to measurable inputs, such as capital and human labor. Instead, TFP is driven by technological advancements, process improvements, and other intangible factors that enable businesses to produce more with the same amount of inputs. AI agents represent a unique technology with the potential to unlock unprecedented levels of innovation across industries and significantly contribute to TFP growth.
Is now the right time for enterprises to jump into Generative AI?
The market impact of generative AI has been substantial. Since the release of GPT-4, the U.S. technology industry’s market capitalization has risen by 50%, adding $6 trillion in shareholder value. Companies like Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have seen their share prices soar due to their investments in AI. However, despite the hype, AI software sales are still relatively modest, accounting for only a tiny portion of the revenue growth at major tech companies. This suggests that the sustainability of the AI stock market boom will depend on the broad commercial application of AI technologies.
Adoption of generative AI is still in its early stages, with only about 5% of American firms currently using some form of AI and an additional 7% planning to adopt it within six months. However, large corporations are already exploring the potential of AI agents, with companies like JPMorgan Chase, Capgemini, and Bayer boasting hundreds of AI use cases across various functions. These applications range from simple tasks for low-skilled workers to complex tools for highly skilled employees, showcasing the versatility of AI agents.
Despite the current challenges and cautious adoption, early evidence suggests that AI might be more about job creation than elimination. Only 12% of corporations view AI as a replacement for human labour, and new job categories like “prompt engineers” and “explainability engineers” are emerging. As businesses continue experimenting with generative AI, we see practical applications across industries, from customer service improvements and administrative efficiency to enhanced research and data processing.
If your business has hit a roadblock in productivity or automation, then it might be time to start investigating what generative AI solutions can do for you before your competitors get there first.
Can businesses start using AI agents today?
Businesses that embrace AI agents and adapt to this new paradigm of productivity will be best positioned to thrive in the era of generative AI and become a TFP growth leader in their industry. The only question is, where can businesses go to start trying these technologies without a huge upfront investment?
As the market expands and vendors offer increasingly niche products, it becomes harder and harder for non-technical decision makers to search and find AI products that can truly shift the dial for their business. As of today, businesses have no way of easily onboarding this advanced technology without a significant amount of in-house investment and expertise. Even selecting a vendor presents challenges; the understanding required to compare and contrast different vendors on their merits is largely technical.
Solitude aims to provide a centralized hub where businesses can discover, test, and implement AI agents specific to their needs. By offering a curated selection of high-quality AI products and a user-friendly interface, Solitude helps businesses find AI Agents for their use cases built by expert sellers all in one place; enabling them to compare the quality of different agents without a PhD!
As always, if you’ve enjoyed reading this and want to learning more about how Solitude can supercharge your business; we welcome you to join our waitlist for an invite to our early adopter’s program: https://solitude.ai
Sources
- https://www.economist.com/business/2024/02/29/how-businesses-are-actually-using-generative-ai
- “AI Adoption in the Enterprise 2023” by O’Reilly (https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ai-adoption-in-the-enterprise-2023/)
- “Generative AI Set To Revolutionize Industries And Propel The U.S. Economy” by Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishatalagala/2023/03/31/generative-ai-set-to-revolutionize-industries-and-propel-the-us-economy/)
- “The Rise of Generative AI” by Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2021/07/the-rise-of-generative-ai)
