Governance, Strategy Needed in Enterprise Generative AI Adoption
Education is a first-wave adopter of AI, as momentum builds in enterprises.
The current wave of popularity for generative AI is just "scratching the surface." The real impact will be felt in enterprises — including education — which, over the next seven years, will see growth in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a new market analysis, "Generative AI Business Outcomes: Identifying Enterprise Commercial Opportunities."
According to technology market research firm ABI Research, generative AI "will add more than US$450 billion to the enterprise market across twelve different verticals over the next seven years." One of those is education, which is an early adopter.
Reece Hayden, Senior Analyst at ABI Research, said: "Content-heavy verticals like marketing and education are already seeing disruption across a range of job roles in the first wave of adoption."
"Generative AI already has hundreds of use cases across these enterprise verticals," ABI noted. "But accuracy, performance, and enterprise readiness will mean that use cases will come in three distinct waves. Advertisers are bringing projects to market more quickly, social media managers can deploy content more effectively with greater localization, and teachers are already developing a more personalized curriculum."
The first wave of adoption, according to ABI, has an internal focus, such as augmenting employee productivity.
In the second wave, enterprises will start building products and services around AI. In the third and most significant wave, AI will be used to automate and optimize processes.
ABI noted that in the present wave, a lack of strategy and governance as individual units within organizations look to find ways to integrate AI into their operations in "isolated deployments" will lead to fragmentation between business processes.
"Avoiding this requires a more careful and measured approach to enterprise deployment with a central corporate strategy on generative AI usage, including employee usage, governance, legal approach, and expected business outcomes," according to ABI.
ABI's Hayben said: "Building a framework to support enterprise generative AI deployment is critical. For operational consistency, enterprises should adopt a common platform that includes foundation models, low/no code tools, guardrails, and curated data sets. This framework can then allow different business units to build highly contextualized, use case-specific models and applications."
The findings were part of ABI's report "Generative AI Business Outcomes: Identifying Enterprise Commercial Opportunities." The full report can be purchased for $4,500.