Organisations come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is for sure. From government entities, universities and national research institutions, to corporates, SMEs, startups and single-person businesses, the ripples of new generative AI (GenAI) are washing across industries, functions, jobs and tasks, sweeping away old assumptions.

Different organisations are harnessing opportunities in different ways, and at different speeds. Much of the performance improvements are being driven by the task or job function owners who get their hands on access to Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, and rapidly start to experiment across workflows.

In smaller of organisations a forty percent time, cost and quality improvement can have an immediate impact on the overall business. In larger organisations, it can take longer, depending on the workflow, ability to recognise what is going on, and adoption/scaling rate.

But timelines and critical paths are being compressed everywhere. In my business I have seen activities go from months to weeks, and from weeks to hours. For some, especially so-called knowledge workers, who have developed their skills over many years, this can be hard to process.

A big challenge in scaling performance improvements from applying GenAI across larger organisational functions is the ability to capture, track and harness what’s going on in the business. Does that forty percent cost/time and quality improvement in Marketing and Communications mean the business gets swamped with so many leads that the Sales and Services team cannot keep pace? Does it create new bottlenecks, or lead to frustration that teams across other functions are not embracing these new capabilities faster?

How are you capturing all of these evolving skillsets and toolsets across the organisation, and how is Leadership reacting?

Do Leadership see a forty percent efficiency improvement and immediately translate that into a cost/headcount saving? Knee-jerk reactions to cutting costs resulting from GenAI-powered savings can be a big mistake. And that is partly the concern of individuals and teams who may be reluctant to demonstrate how GenAI tools are improving their performance (Shadow IT).

Perhaps these time, cost and quality improvements you are accruing across functions gives you the opportunity to re-wire the business and move into a new space, or scale internationally. Remember those growth plans that you always dreamed of but were out of reach because of…capacity and capability? Time to revisit that.

Perhaps you don’t need that merger or acquisition anymore because you have released a lot of new capacity in your organisation that can be applied to new initiatives. And you also need to consider any ongoing M&A or investment decisions. How will GenAI impact your target acquisition in six months once all the negotiations have been completed?

Perhaps it’s time for Leadership to press pause before you press commit on the 2025 budget to be presented to the Board.

Which brings us to the question, how is the Leadership team and Board making use of GenAI? Is it enhancing their decision-making process, allowing them to simultaneously drive the performance of existing markets, and make adjacent moves?

Consider that these GenAI tools are only going to get better, and your organisation’s capabilities are going to radically improve, far beyond anything imaginable before November 2022. And if you are in the R&D, science or manufacturing businesses, the next six months will start to see new capabilities emerging around simulation and science (molecules, materials, manufacturing processes…). Not to mention the increase in the use of Agents executing tasks. These will all have profound implications.

But remember, your clients, competitors and partners also have access to the same cheap tools that you do. As well as that disruptor lurking in the shadows who has no experience in your industry, but in possession of a great idea and some cheap, powerful GenAI tools.
 

Organisations are just discovering that LLMs such as ChatGPT have a lot of latent capability that can be tapped by teams with the right mindset and artisanal approach. Leadership needs to step up to harness it at scale, and condition the organisation for a continuous re-wiring of skillsets and toolsets.


That’s easier for those Leaders with the right…mindset.

Patrick Halford is based in Finland and an Advisor to Next Colabs (Canada) on the organisational impact of GenAI, an expert at Singularity Group (California), and a guest lecturer at Hanken & SSE. He is also a frequent international business & technology conference moderator and speaker, and a published author.