Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has a noticeable presence in organisations around the world today. What’s next for the technology?
According to a 2024 McKinsey study, 65% of organisations surveyed globally are regularly using Gen AI. Gen AI’s ability to efficiently create content, generate code, and process information has strengthened its role in functions like marketing, product development, and information technology (IT).
To stay competitive in an ever-changing economy, organisations should build on their foundation and explore Gen AI’s next frontier.
Gen AI’s potential to harness domain-specific information could lead to more advanced use cases beyond what is seen in publicly available Gen AI tools today. The technology’s future could lie in using proprietary knowledge, which can accelerate complex activities like error and fraud detection or operational performance predictions.
The finance sector: An exciting launchpad
The finance industry could be an exciting launchpad for this new range of advanced Gen AI applications.
In Asia, financial institutions are already harnessing Gen AI in their daily operations. One activity is sales pitching, in which advisors are using the technology to analyse customer needs and compare products so that personalised sales proposals can be created within minutes.
There is an opportunity for Gen AI to evolve beyond content creation. The technology could tap on its strengths in consolidating troves of information into evidence and insight. Asia’s financial institutions are already investing heavily in new digital capabilities, creating the right infrastructure to finetune Gen AI tools for domain-specific activities.
For example, Gen AI could help financial institutions optimise auditing processes for the timely generation of reports. The technology could increase the speed, frequency, and efficiency with which financial institutions audit financial, IT, and legal domains.
AI-powered auditing is already gaining traction in Asia’s financial institutions, such as AIA. The insurance provider has implemented “AIA Robin,” an interactive Gen AI-powered system that leverages advanced language models from Azure OpenAI to automate key aspects of the internal audit reporting process.
With bolder steps with Gen AI, the technology could impact 11 billion working hours per week in Asia Pacific. The financial sector could be transformed with AI-powered intelligent decision-making, allowing staff like analysts to focus on higher-value activities like fact-checking, deeper analyses, and producing sharp recommendations.
Measured steps forward
Organisations cannot ignore the inevitable risks involved with private enterprise data. For the financial sector, Gen AI could produce hallucinated outputs or accelerate negative financial conditions. For most industries, the technology comes with data privacy, cybersecurity , unfair social scoring, and behavioural manipulation concerns. It is on organisations to ensure their use of Gen AI remains ethical, accurate, and secure.
Forward-looking organisations should build up their internal governance structures to implement AI responsibly, avoid potential penalties, and protect their reputation. While efforts are underway to establish clearer guidelines and regulations on AI and data governance in Asia, these are still a work in progress.
Governing committees at the group, business, and operational levels are critical step to ensure that AI innovation can happen safely with minimal risk. These multi-level committees should scrutinise Gen AI use, assess operational issues, and flag ethical concerns, creating a whole of organisation responsibility towards managing AI risks.
Governance must be guided by the right principles to ensure meaningful oversight. Decisions over AI use should be guided by principles that manage risk based on customer impact. For example, principles like explainability and accountability could require AI-powered tools to only make decisions that can be elaborated in simple and easy-to-use language. Similar approaches could be applied to decisions derived from complex Gen AI-powered activities.
Take the next step now
It is an exciting time for organisations to take steps forward into advanced Gen AI use cases. There is a momentum that should not be ignored, now that Gen AI has proved its value in basic tasks.
Technology leaders must drive these new use cases with a strong degree of human supervision. Once the right structures and systems are in place to quantify and manage risk, only should organisations progressively expand the degree of automation in any advanced use cases.
With the right controls, an economy with complex activities powered by Gen AI could be the next frontier, and it is time for truly innovative organisations to take responsible steps into this future.
