Insights professionals are getting on board with generative AI
The 2023 Greenbook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) Business & Innovation Report focuses in part on attitudes about (and adoption of) generative AI among insights professionals. The report, chock full of survey data collected this summer, offers this finding:
“More than two-thirds [of insights professionals] are currently using or trying generative AI… Insights professionals tend to be cautiously optimistic about what AI can do, and about 40% of buyers and most suppliers believe their companies will strongly advocate for the use of generative AI at work or at least recommend it.”
In other words, less than a year after generative AI first became a “thing”, the train is leaving the station; it will only accelerate as it heads down the tracks.
How insights pros expect to use generative AI
So, what exactly are insights professionals doing (or do they envision doing) with generative AI?
According to the GRIT report, “The general, but not universal, consensus across [survey respondents] suggests the most logical applications [after software coding] are knowledge management, report writing, and miscellaneous common tasks.”
Generative AI in Northern Light SinglePoint
And that’s exactly how Northern Light is leveraging generative AI in our SinglePoint™ knowledge management platform for market and competitive intelligence. The new generative AI-driven question answering feature in SinglePoint gives business researchers a head start on whatever their topic of inquiry is, by synthesizing key points directly responsive to a user’s query in a coherent, narrative form from the 20 most relevant documents in a search result.
In fact, SinglePoint’s generative AI produces two types of summaries in response to a user’s question. The first is a document-by-document summary; the second is an “executive summary” – a synthesis of all the document-specific summarized responses.
Importantly, all the generative AI-written text from SinglePoint contains embedded citations and hot links to the source documents from which each nugget of information or insight is derived. And those source documents are limited to the client’s well-vetted SinglePoint content collections – Northern Light Business News, primary and licensed secondary market research reports, industry journals and databases, corporate financial reports, and more – so the accuracy of the information is very high. When your content sources are credible, your generative AI answers are likely to be reliable. (This mitigates the much-discussed “hallucination” problem associated with generative AI that draws its information from the general internet.)
Generative AI supports human researchers
Of course, generative AI answers are only a starting point for serious business research. In SinglePoint, their greatest value may be to direct a user to the most on-point documents to drill down into, and suggest follow-up questions a user might ask to gain a deeper understanding of their topic of inquiry. Because generative AI is no replacement for the human researcher; it is a great tool to support a person’s research efforts.
And for insights professionals using the GRIT report as a framework to understand generative AI, remember that “knowledge management” and “report writing” were identified as the two gen AI applications likely to provide the greatest near-term value. (P.S. – Northern Light SinglePoint checks both of those boxes!)