No Looking Back.
Generative AI is opening a new age of creativity.
We met with Alex Naressi, Managing Director of Accenture Song R&D and Innovation Center, who shared with us his fascinating journey exploring and researching the world of Gen AI, OpenAI, and their applications in the creative field.
When your job is to research and analyze new technology, emerging behavioral trends, consumer data, and innovative disruption, your days become a cloud of opportunities and hyped ideas. But in the case of Generative AI Alex had it clear. This will impact us all.
Moving swiftly, Alex decided to spearhead this space for Accenture Song. The team saw the potential and we started to work on applying AI for content generation and optimization, and explored use cases ranging from text generation to image generation to music, and voice generation. Alex established Accenture’s point of view, connecting with different players, including OpenAI, and understanding future opportunities in the space.
For Alex, the turning point was in June 2022 during the Cannes Lions when we first partnered with OpenAI to unveil innovations with clients and media, combining text, voice, and video. He invited top creative directors from all over the world to our Accenture Song Innovation Center in Sophia Antipolis, on the hills of Cannes, and he showed them what we could do at the intersection of generative AI and creativity. That was a defining moment because we could see that creatives were immediately seeing the potential. At the same time, the world could see a wave of inspiring examples emerging publicly, like ads, comics, and magazine covers (and well beyond).
“What was striking as well is that if you would have asked me several years ago, I would have considered creativity as the last thing that could be touched by AI,” Alex said. “We would probably have started with a mundane task, very repetitive and sort of low quality, and suddenly we saw that the most prominent, visible, and shareable space was in the arts and creative space. That led me to reconsider R&D priorities and to accelerate in applying generative AI for creativity and share learnings and insights with the growing number of early adopters. My objective was to anticipate how we would bring value to our clients in the future, to future-proof our own business, and to inspire and connect early adopters so that they could support and learn from each other.”
The first pioneering engagements built confidence and created a snowball effect. He started to build starter kits and ran induction sessions so that colleagues could get started with the right tools and techniques. Alex was amazed by the quality of projects going on all around the world and focused R&D to systematically keep up with innovation, share at least on a weekly basis and tackle the next wave of applications of generative AI, trying to anticipate and then push the boundaries. For example, he worked on generating videos and holograms and tackled new ways to fine-tune models and simplify the art of prompt engineering. “It’s difficult to have a long-term point of view about this technology because it’s moving so fast, but I have the sense that this is the start of something new, and there is no way back. I believe that not only every single knowledge worker but also every human will be impacted and that it’s going to open a new age of creativity.”
The human touch to creativity
In short, the potential benefits are twofold: it’s about unleashing creativity and amplifying productivity. Generative AI is unleashing creativity because it allows you to go from zero to one, explore an unbeaten path, and iterate on a hundred ideas. It’s not going to replace the creative process end-to-end, but it will greatly accelerate or automate parts of it in profound ways. And improving productivity is the other benefit, the fact that you can generate much more content, much faster, makes people more efficient. Creatives can be more precise, create more variants for content, and become more personal and relevant.
Still, we can’t forget that this is a very risky space. Companies have a very strong mandate not to use it in certain ways without careful review. In fact, we work closely with legal and responsible AI teams to identify risks and mitigate them.
Alex encourages people to get informed as fast as possible, imagine how this will impact their work and the world around us, and contribute their insights because nobody has the answer or one central source of truth.
Helping clients
“The most frequent question that clients ask is, “I want to get up to speed, I want to get smart on this.” They can feel that there’s something really disruptive going on probably because it is echoed by the media, friends, and even schools. All this news and noise creates a lot of uncertainty in clients, also because this is growing so fast and so big that it’s relatively difficult to grasp. Our clients, first and foremost, want to understand the application and what’s in it for them. And to a certain extent, they and we also, want to understand the risks; the technical risks, the legal risks, and the ethical risks, because we are innovating in uncharted territory, really. It’s also easy to extrapolate too fast, so it takes time to really wrap one’s head around how you can use it effectively, and it’s very easy to be impressed by new tech like ChatGPT. It also requires constant watch because there are new tools and new features from one version to another. Our clients are turning to us because we are independent, have relationships with the big players, and we are seen as a trusted advisor.”
Some clients are more proactive than others; they might already have identified issues. For instance, they want to address a pain point around content creation or adaptation, or they might want to optimize their product innovation process. Some even want to become a generative AI brand and be at the forefront by experimenting as fast as possible. Whatever the level, all brands are keeping an eye on it.
Evolution of AI
Technology continues to evolve, and the pace of innovation is accelerating. Alex doubts that it will slow down or plateau. This is a space that’s moving faster than any other that he has ever seen in his career. The internet has matured, and people have access to more knowledge than ever, layering into already existing data and systems, and it’s powered by open-source and creative communities.
Alex feels positive for people in the future. “Two years from now, I am hopeful that we will have addressed two fronts. The first one is our internal progress, looking at the way we design, create, build, etc., and understanding how we can transform our processes and adopt new tools, augmenting creativity and productivity. The second front is with our clients. I think that in two years from now, a lot of them will have adopted these tools, and they will probably also be infused into many of the other tools we use today. Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI potentially foreshadows entirely new search and productivity experiences.”
As the technology continues to evolve, the landscape will become increasingly complex to navigate. People’s habits, values and expectations will evolve.
Follow Alex on Linkedin
