Unlocking the Power of Generative AI

As AI continues to develop, we can expect to see even more transformative changes in the years to come. GenAI is the newest trend that has come to revolutionize both busi-ness and the world, igniting a wealth of remarkably creative ideas with respect to its potential. Most conversations in 2024 are likely to be based on realizing real-world, practical use cases of gen AI.

In an era dominated by vast data sets, the collaboration between humans and machines has gained paramount significance. AI plays a pivotal role in extracting value from data, emerging as a crucial tool for businesses across various scales. The transition from early AI to GenAI signifies a move beyond using AI merely as a tactical decision-making aid at specific points to a stage where it actively generates content. This transformative shift is profound and is poised to impact nearly every facet of businesses.

Amid the ever-evolving business landscape, Gen AI stands out as a formidable force, bringing about a transformative impact and offering a strategic edge. Leveraging its sophisticated analytics and predictive prowess, businesses can attain a substantial advantage. Gen AI empowers organizations to base decisions on data, promoting agility and fuelling innovation. Whether automating routine tasks or offering profound insights, Gen AI enhances efficiency, enabling swift adaptation to market changes. Its capacity to seamlessly integrate across sectors facilitates personalized experiences for both customers and employees, establishing a new standard for competitiveness.

“The business possibilities for Generative AI (GenAI) are broad, spanning many industries and many different business functions, including marketing and sales, research and development, and customer operations and support,” says Sudha KV, Vice President, Dell Technologies, India. “With all the attention GenAI has generated, customers are trying to determine how best to generate value for their businesses from this emerging technology. Businesses have already adopted AI to automate complex processes, increase productivity, and accelerate results and outcomes in specific use cases. Organizations are leveraging GenAI to get more value from their own data for more data-supported decision-making results, to increase productivity, and to drive more value to end-customers.” 

As per McKinsey research, Gen AI could enable automation of up to 70 percent of business activities, across majority occupations, between now and 2030, adding trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. “In fact here in India, a recent survey by PwC “India Workforce Hopes and Fears 2023,” some 51% of Indians believe that AI will help them improve productivity at work, with a higher than global average where only 31% believe AI will benefit them at work,” says Manish Alshi, Head of Channels and Growth Technologies - India & SAARC, Check Point Software Technologies

“Generative AI-based capabilities have been around for a while though ChatGPT recently took center stage. It has powerful language capabilities and presents a game-changing opportunity for businesses irrespective of their size,” he adds. 

“Generative AI (GenAI) has influenced businesses to reinvent themselves this past year,” opines Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI research, ManageEngine. “Businesses have benefited greatly from successful GenAI research and development, providing them a distinct advantage over others who have not. Business process optimisation is a huge advantage brought by GenAI. This increases the team's overall productivity and frees them up to work on issues that require their attention. Furthermore, GenAI helps deliver a uniform communication style with both clients and staff.”

Deepak Pargaonkar, Vice President, Solution Engineering – Salesforce commends that the operationalization of large language models (LLMs) is a pivotal step forward. Beyond content generation and analysis, LLMs are becoming instrumental in decision-making and workflow automation. “This shift marks a significant transformation in how businesses leverage AI for efficiency and innovation. Businesses can harness AI across text, images, videos, and audio for search, creating a more intuitive and responsive digital economy,” he says.

Harnessing the AI potential

Effective applications of generative AI rely on leveraging extensive and high-quality data, coupled with the appropriate combination of skills, budgets, and resources. Collaboration between business and IT teams is crucial in setting priorities and ensuring successful implementation. Regular monitoring and enhancement of data are equally necessary to maintain reliability, consistency, and integrity. Moreover, adherence to data and privacy regulations, including considerations for data sovereignty restrictions, is imperative for the success of generative AI projects.

As a disruptive organization in the supply chain industry, 3SC has always taken pride in being the agent of positive change. “Keeping the streak going, we have launched a generative AI chatbot – GAURI (Generative AI Unlocks Resilience Intelligence),” says Mohneesh Saxena, Chief Product Officer, 3SC Solutions. “GAURI is a Generative AI and Foundation Models Purpose built to achieve value chain resiliency. GAURI's key standout feature is its ability to implement actionable recommendations for improving supply chain operations in just a single click. In addition, it offers analytics-based insights and addresses supply chain queries, translating your supply chain into a proactive mechanism that aces the market no matter the influential parameters.”

At Dell Technologies, with GenAI, its AI systems started to speak human; they could interact with everybody, and anybody could be an innovator; anybody could access them. “We changed the world of AI from an ecosystem of a hundred thousand experts that could use it to all of humanity,” says Sudha KV of Dell Technologies.

“As the market demand for AI enabled solutions continues to climb, Dell is committed to integrating AI-created efficiencies into our products to keep up with the industry and build competitive advantages. Currently, every major product line at Dell has actively worked to utilise machine intelligence as a core component of a modern product or solution. In fact, Dell has close to a thousand AI/ML-related projects going on at any time. The two domains our product teams focus on when integrating AI are embedded intelligence and powered management,” she further adds.

Check Point Software harnesses the potential of AI in its products and solutions to meet the needs of the target market, particularly in the area of security. The company leverages ThreatCloud AI, which is the brain behind all of Check Point's products, to provide accurate prevention against advanced attacks. “Check Point uses more than 70 different tools to analyse threats and protect against attacks, more than 40 of which are AI-based, which help with behavioral analysis, analyzing large amounts of threat data from a variety of sources, including the darknet, making it easier to detect zero-day vulnerabilities or automate patching of security vulnerabilities,“ tells Manish Alshi of Check Point Software Technologies.

ESDS actively invests in R&D, with 20% of its annual revenue dedicated to developing AI-powered solutions across industries. “From intelligent chatbots that boost customer satisfaction by 65%, as shown in a recent survey by Forrester, to AI-powered analytics that optimize production lines by 12%, according to a PWC report, we are delivering tangible results. We focus on understanding our customers' unique challenges and tailoring AI solutions that seamlessly integrate into their workflows. This human-centric approach allows us to unlock the true potential of AI, exceeding expectations and driving sustainable growth for our partners and ourselves,” says Piyush Somani - Chairman and Managing Director ESDS Software Solution.

The integration of AI within the Salesforce platform has been a longstanding and integral strategy. “Specifically, our Einstein AI technologies play a crucial role in enhancing various aspects of customer interactions within Customer 360. Notably, the introduction of Einstein GPT, the world's first generative AI CRM technology, signifies a major leap forward. Furthermore, the introduction of Einstein Copilot and Einstein Copilot Studio exemplifies our commitment to driving significant productivity gains,” explains Deepak Pargaonkar of Salesforce.

Avaali Solutions has focused on a robust Sourcing and Supplier Collaboration platform with AI solutions to reduce supplier risks and spending. “Our platform also leverages the power of AI for intelligent document processing, which helps companies deliver superior efficiencies in automating their processes. Our solutions for Gen AI for sourcing and contracts to supplier Q&A and information discovery are designed to help companies manage their supplier relationships better and empower them to make informed decisions based on data-driven insights,” says Srividya Kannan, Founder and CEO, Avaali Solutions.
 

Weaponization of AI tools

However, Generative AI tools are a double-edged sword. While it can help developers write and fix code quicker, enable better chat services for companies, or even replace search engines, it also poses a risk if used by hackers who can leverage it to potentially create malware and phishing emails, leading to more cyberattacks.

“We are seeing cybercriminals increasingly use AI to support a multitude of malicious activities, ranging from thwarting the algorithms that detect social engineering to mimicking human behaviour through activities such as AI audio spoofing and creating other deepfakes,” says Vivek Srivastava, Country Manager, India & SAARC – Fortinet. “We anticipate that cybercriminals will take advantage of AI in additional ways that we haven’t seen yet in the coming years.” 

Comments Ramprakash Ramamoorthy of ManageEngine, “When applied incorrectly, GenAI can help attackers generate malware and convincing phishing emails. Moreover, problems like deepfakes and voice cloning are also becoming increasingly prevalent. Within a business, numerous security issues can arise from an overall lack of transparency on terms behind AI decision-making as well as the data used for training.” 

Attackers will use AI to conduct generative profiling, scraping social profiles and other public websites for personally identifiable information which could easily be turned into an as-a-service offering. Vivek points out that there will be more AI-chained attacks, with cybercriminals using actionable models to make their attack chains more modular. 

AI poisoning attacks, instances where cybercriminals intentionally tamper with AI model training data and systems themselves will become common, with malicious actors likely using automated toolkits to execute these hacks. Security teams will need to start protecting against these attacks, relying on an intrusion prevention service and application control to protect an organization’s AI assets.

Zubair Chowgale, Senior Technical Consultant - APMEA, Securonix too agrees that the widespread adoption of unsecured Gen AI-powered tools has significantly expanded the attack surface for threat actors, thereby introducing new vulnerabilities. “Model theft is an attack technique threat actors can exploit where an attacker could steal a model to gain access to the underlying algorithms and in some cases engage in the theft of intellectual property. Threat actors can potentially save a lot of time and money by not having to build the threat models that are used for cybercrimes.” 

Zubair further points out that the high implementation costs and the need for skilled AI professionals pose obstacles for many businesses, while another aspect can still be how the regulations on using GenAI shape up in the near future which could impact its usage.

Srividya Kannan, of Avaali Solutions too points out that the cost of developing and implementing Gen AI applications is another constraint that needs to be considered. “Companies may not have the resources or the time to invest in designing customized AI solutions that meet their needs. Furthermore, AI is a complex technology that requires specialized skills and knowledge to develop and deploy.

“Before introducing enterprise generative AI tools, organisations must ensure their data is locked down to a least-privilege or zero-trust model,” says Maheswaran S, Country Manager -S. Asia, Varonis. “When employees can access only the information they need to do their jobs – and nothing more – the potential damage a malicious insider or external attacker can do decreases significantly.”

To sum up

There is no denying the fact that Gen AI will continue to redefine the technology landscape in 2024. While gen AI continues to be a key growth factor for enterprises in 2024, new policies and regulations will simultaneously shape the guardrails of technology in India.

Generative AI is poised to be a game-changer for channel growth too, with experts predicting a US $159 billion opportunity for the channel ecosystem by 2028. The channel IT spend will reach nearly $5 billion by year’s end, defining 70% of IT spending in 2023. 

“As we approach 2024, we find ourselves immersed in a captivating symbiosis between AI and cloud computing, fundamentally reshaping the technological landscape. 2024 is going to be pivotal for laying the foundation for efficient, integrated, and secure cloud ecosystems. The canvas of technological transformation extends further as the convergence of IoT, data, and AI paints a vibrant picture, setting the stage for businesses to navigate a dynamic future,” sums up Hemant Tiwari, MD - India, Hitachi Vantara.

However as pointed out despite its promises, Gen AI adoption faces significant constraints. Privacy concerns and ethical considerations surrounding data availability, usage and AI decision-making processes are critical challenges. 

According to the Salesforce research - The Promises and Pitfalls of Generative AI at Work, one other significant constraint is the lack of oversight and approval for Gen AI usage in the workplace. As more employees are expecting to use Gen AI in the workplace soon, the technology's penetration is set to continue, potentially leading to unauthorized and unmonitored usage.

As organizations navigate the AI adoption journey, addressing these constraints becomes imperative to ensure responsible and effective integration of Gen AI, promoting a balance between innovation and ethical considerations.