The GenAI surge: Navigating best practices and strategies for successful usage
The advent—and wild popularity—of generative AI (GenAI) has prompted a surge of data solutions designed to surface crucial insights and unlock data value in an instant. However, with the rise of any technological trend, inevitably, there comes a proliferation of tools, making it not only difficult to choose, but difficult to know what’s right for an enterprise’s unique needs.
A panel of experts joined KMWorld’s webinar, Unlocking the Power of Data-Driven Strategies: A GenAI Journey, to examine GenAI strategies and best practices for maximizing ROI, operational efficiency, personalization, and more, in the midst of an AI surge.
Pat Converse, global partnership director at Grid Dynamics, kicked off the discussion by explaining that the importance of data in the modern era is changing dramatically.
Conor Jensen, field CDO at Dataiku, added that the explosion of GenAI has contributed significantly to this change.
“It’s not just the data, it’s the application of data,” said Jensen. “We’re getting hit in the face—again and again and again—with how important having a good data strategy is, how important data is to a company in enabling all the facets of what that company wants to do. GenAI is just one more wave pushing that forward because now it’s access to the usefulness of new types of data.”
“Your data is still at the heart of all this [GenAI],” he added.
Converse pointed to a rampant trope relevant to the last few years in data: “Data is the new currency.”
Sneha Narahalli, head of product and UX at Sephora, explained that “I don’t think data is the new currency. It has always been the currency…However, I think the value of this currency is changing.”
Narahalli further explained that the value of data increases based on the maturity of how organizations choose to use this data and how important data collection and application is.
“Generating insights and unlocking customer experiences, that didn't exist before, is what GenAI is accelerating,” she added. “Apart from unlocking these new experiences, getting more data from these experiences…is what companies need to focus on.”
Converse emphasized that the role GenAI will play in data-driven strategies is fairly unique—particularly in the realm of vectorization and adding context to data.
“[Vectorized data] really changes, in my opinion, how some of the inner workings of our data strategy has to be to really create value on [GenAI],” said Converse.
The widespread application of GenAI to power a variety of processes can be overwhelming—ranging in use cases from customer service to shopping assistants, speech translation, creative copy generation, product design ideation, data migration, and more.
Narahalli boiled it down to its general purposes, explaining that “there are two main things that we’re seeing in how GenAI is helping organizations: one is empowering employees to do more, and the second is unlocking client experiences.”
Jensen echoed Narahalli’s points, adding that “[Thinking of who you are as] a brand…is an important thing for companies…to think about as they’re starting to pursue GenAI. We need to keep in mind that it’s still a technology and it's still a tool that can help a company be better at what it already is.”
Whether an enterprise is a fashion company focusing on luxury or a manufacturing business delivering lean processes, GenAI should be applied to enhance the things an enterprise is already focused on, according to Jensen.
For more insights about modern GenAI application, including a detailed exploration of use cases, strategic augmentation, and inventory management, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.