Enterprises lag their employees when it comes to generative AI use

Business strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company has written extensively about generative AI (GenAI) over the past several years, and their latest research on the topic is an important addition to the body of knowledge about GenAI use in the enterprise.  The gist of their observation is, in many large companies today, employees are way ahead of their organization when it comes to using GenAI on the job.

McKinsey puts it this way: “As many employees adopt generative AI at work, companies struggle to follow suit. To capture value from current momentum, businesses must transform their processes, structures, and approach to talent.”

McKinsey generative AI survey finds employees leading the charge

According to McKinsey’s research, “Employees are forging ahead with gen AI, a broadly accessible technology that puts AI’s potential at everyone’s fingertips. Nearly all respondents (91 percent) say they use gen AI for work and the vast majority are enthusiastic about it. Nine in ten also believe the tools could positively impact their work experience and most believe gen AI will help with a range of skills, from critical thinking to creativity.”

It seems many employees are, on their own, using one of the commercially available consumer-facing generative AI applications (e.g., Chat GPT).  While such a “freelance” approach – or, as McKinsey labels it, “individual experimentation” – to using GenAI demonstrates employees’ interest and enthusiasm for the technology, the problem is there’s no organizational governance or control over the technology, nor any protection against the type of “hallucination” (inaccurate results) that is a known risk associated with large language models (LLMs) trained on broad-based internet content.

GenAI must move “from individual experimentation to strategic value capture”

Accordingly, McKinsey advises enterprises to take a thoughtful, holistic approach to generative AI to move “from individual experimentation to strategic value capture.”

Some of Northern Light’s clients have experienced first-hand one of the successful early use cases of GenAI in an enterprise application that produces strategic value: competitive intelligence (CI) research.  Using the generative AI-based question answering feature in Northern Light SinglePoint™,  called AI Insights, users have dramatically reduced the amount of time (down from two hours to 20 seconds!), and improved the quality, of their first pass at their CI research assignments.

Northern Light was the first CI research platform vendor to embed GenAI in its offering 18 months ago.  And because Northern Light uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to limit the generative AI analysis to curated, high-quality sources of content within the platform, instead of the LLM’s training data, the problem of hallucination is avoided.

Deploying authorized GenAI applications like SinglePoint, which have withstood the rigorous review of an organization’s governance committee and are then closely monitored, are the only way for business leaders to feel confident they have a handle on the value generative AI is delivering.  As McKinsey notes, “There’s no easy-to-prove business case for employee-driven adoption and the piecemeal implementation of use cases… [Technology] deployment should link to value creation opportunities and measurable outcomes.”

Northern Light wholeheartedly agrees with McKinsey’s recommendation, and our large enterprise clients across multiple industries are following suit.