Generative AI Impact on Business

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational technology that represents a breakthrough likely to propel economic growth and massive changes to society and economic systems. Unlike past transformation technologies that required an entire architecture and infrastructure before society as a whole could implement them, generative AI technology is widely available now on infrastructure that people already have.

In fact, you can access this new and revolutionary technology on the same computer or mobile device that you use every day. This means generative AI has the potential to make a huge impact on businesses in every industry and to do so at a faster speed than any transformation technology society has experienced in the past.

Explore the generative AI impact on business, including the benefits companies can gain when they use generative AI, how companies are putting this technology to work, and the risks and challenges that generative AI brings. 

What is generative AI? 

Generative AI (GenAI) is artificial intelligence capable of creating text, images, code, videos, and more. This technology uses deep learning and neural network models to learn how data relates to one another, such as words in a sentence or elements in an image, to then create something new that looks like the materials the algorithm saw in training. By applying this training process to a massive amount of data, the algorithm can add enough random features around the identifying qualities of data, for example, the important features of a sentence or the basic components of an image of a dog, to create something from scratch. 

Benefits of generative AI

The main reason that generative AI has the potential to be such a disrupter across industries is that it offers a suite of benefits to companies and organizations that use it. Generative AI can create writing in a variety of business formats in a matter of seconds, from internal business memos to marketing strategies and content to creating summaries and reports. Even in situations where the generative AI can’t completely create the document or picture you need, generative AI can help you start the creative process by creating prototypes or first drafts. 

You can also optimize business processes using generative AI as part of machine learning. Generative AI can help you create scenarios to test to look for ways to improve your business processes, and you can also use it to create synthetic data to train other kinds of machine learning algorithms. 

A third major benefit businesses can gain with generative AI is the ability to improve customers' experiences and services. Generative AI can power chatbots that answer customers' questions day or night, for example. 

Generative AI impact on business

When several generative AI apps became available for customers in 2022, it was immediately clear that generative AI had the potential to change the way businesses, employers, and employees functioned together. In a 2023 report, McKinsey estimated that generative AI could contribute $2.6 to $4.4 trillion annually to the economy [1]. The Oliver Wyman Forum estimates that the total contribution to the economy that generative AI will make will total $20 trillion in GDP by 2030 and save human workers a total of 300 billion work hours per year [2]. This economic potential spurred private equity and venture capital firms to invest more than $56 billion into generative AI companies in 2024, nearly double the investment total in 2023, according to S&P Global [3]. 

In the Oliver Wyman Forum Generative AI Survey of 2024, the organization asked respondents in 16 countries how often they use generative AI in their current jobs. Forty-six percent of United States respondents reported using it at least once a week. Out of that number, 11 percent reported using generative AI every day [2]. They reported that a global average of 55 percent of employees use generative AI at least once a week. 

Generative AI’s impact on the workforce

Generative AI could have as large of an impact on the global workforce as it does on the global economy, but the future is unclear. The Oliver Wyman survey found that 96 percent of global employees believe that generative AI can help them in their daily work [2]. At the same time, 60 percent of employees believe it has the potential to automate them out of a job, and 61 percent believe the technology is not trustworthy. In 2020, the World Economic Forum predicted that generative AI would replace 85 million jobs and create 97 new ones by 2025 [4]. However, as of July 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data couldn’t support the idea that generative AI or automation, in general, was going to rapidly accelerate job loss in any of the categories deemed to be at risk [5]. In many ways, the research isn’t complete enough to say for sure how generative AI will change the workforce. 

Perhaps another statistic that might shed some light on the situation is McKinsey’s projection that 12 million people in the US job market will need to shift their occupations and transition into a new role by 2030 [6]. This estimate represents a 20 percent rise in their projections since 2020. 

Generative AI use cases for business

Companies, organizations, and employees have found many different ways to use generative AI to improve business processes and will continue to look for new ways to implement the technology. McKinsey examined 63 use cases for generative AI and found that 75 percent of the estimated economic value of AI will come from four areas of business: customer services, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development. McKinsey also identified banking, high tech, and life sciences as the industries posed to gain the most benefit from generative AI [1]. 

The Oliver Wyman Forum also projects a high value of generative AI in health care. It estimates that generative AI could save doctors enough time per day to see an additional 500 million patients globally every year [2]. The forum also estimates that generative AI could supplement mental health services and allow an estimated 400 million patients to receive care. 

Some of the specific ways that you can use generative AI in business include: 

• Improving customer experiences and offering customer service: Chatbots can provide virtual customer service whenever your customers need it. Generative AI can also perform sentiment analysis to provide insights into what customers are saying about your brand online. 

• Increasing employee productivity: You can use generative AI as an assistant to help perform daily tasks faster or with more efficiency, generate content from marketing content to internal memos to code for software development, and use generative AI to quickly summarize meetings or documents. 

• Optimizing business processes: You can use generative AI to help identify ways to streamline business processes, such as supply chains. 

Case studies

You can take a closer look at how companies are using generative AI and examine the strategies that companies are taking to implement this tech. For example, Google shared a few case studies from its customers. Some examples include: 

• Target uses Google Cloud to implement AI services on the Target app and its website and to supplement its curbside shopping services.  

• Wendy’s uses a Gemini-powered AI model to offer great customer service while freeing employees to focus on other tasks.

• Fundwell uses Google Cloud to analyze customers’ financial needs and recommend products according to their circumstances.

• Alaska Airlines uses generative AI to provide customers with a chatbot that offers travel agent services.

Explore GenAI for business on Coursera

Generative AI represents a big opportunity for companies in nearly all industries, and it has the potential to disrupt or change the career trajectory of millions of members of the workforce. If you want to learn generative AI skills to help you position yourself to take advantage of generative AI in the coming years, you can find programs on Coursera to help you begin. 

You can find different programs to help you learn skills no matter your industry and career goals. For example, you could enroll in the AI For Business Specialization offered by the University of Pennsylvania to learn the fundamentals of AI and machine learning. Or, you could consider the Generative AI Fundamentals Specialization offered by IBM to help you learn the fundamental skills specific to working with GenAI.