AI’s potential for business is so great we may be on cusp of transformative change comparable to that brought by the steam engine, electricity or the internet.

The new wave of AI – Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) – represents the next major transition in technology platforms, after the internet, mobile, and cloud, and has the potential to have the same profound effects on the world economy as the steam engine, electricity, and the internet.

Traditional AI, which has been used for years, focuses on pattern recognition rather than being built to create new data. OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Microsoft), which has gathered hundreds of millions of users in just a few months, is the most well-known example of the new form of GAI, a new type of AI tech that can generate new content on its own.

The potential for businesses is so relevant that we could experience a new industrial revolution.

Take sales. With the aid of AI, companies can examine vast volumes of data and forecast each customer’s purchasing habits. One of the main benefits of using AI for sales forecasting is that it can improve the accuracy of the predictions by using more data sources, more sophisticated models, and more dynamic updates.

AI can help with client engagement, product presentations, and lead qualification. Companies may save time and money while still offering excellent customer service by using AI-generated salespeople.

GAI should help marketers generate content ideas, get past writer’s block, personalise content more rapidly, find relevant images, and much more, including doing a lot of the heavy lifting of content creation.

AI is already being used by software engineers to automatically produce code. This method is very helpful for repeated activities like writing boilerplate code, data models, and user interfaces. One can save time and concentrate on more difficult jobs that call for human ingenuity and creativity.

Including GAI in proprietary datasets may result in the development of an analytics tool that can respond to queries in natural language. By incorporating external data sources, GAI may also fix data gaps in an organisation’s internal database.

AI is employed in customer service to enhance the customer experience and produce more enjoyable interactions with customers. Support staff may optimise their workflow, respond to client requests more rapidly, and proactively anticipate customer demands with the aid of tech like chatbots and sentiment analysis.

By optimising subjects, titles, photos, videos, and more depending on user preferences and interests, AI may aid in the creation of high-quality content.

AI has already developed into a potent weapon in the battle against cyber-attacks. Cybersecurity systems powered by AI can identify, examine, and respond to malicious attacks more quickly.

Compared to conventional cyber security solutions, AI-based systems are more accurate and effective. For instance, AI can quickly scan a large number of devices for vulnerabilities compared to using human operators.

Additionally, AI systems may identify trends that could be hard for a person to notice.

From the investment perspective, there are many firms (big and small) that will enjoy AI benefits – there are some obvious perceived winners (significant incremental revenue opportunity), but it is too early to know the universe, apart from in a few cases like Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft & Nvidia.

AI has also shown its ability to shift the game in the healthcare sector, from protecting personal information to robotic surgery, and was a key factor in the rapid development of mRNA vaccines.

Autonomous vehicles are being developed worldwide. These autos amass more than a petabyte of data every day to continually maintain optimal driving habits, safety precautions, and travel routes. Construction machinery giant Caterpillar says that its autonomous mining machines can improve productivity by 30pc. Amazon is often referred to as the king of e-commerce AI: Almost every stage of the company’s customer life cycle and other procedures now use AI. Goldman Sachs has tried to model the improvements in productivity and equity market valuation due to new AI use. Obviously, this is a difficult task but their baseline scenario is a 1.5pc productivity gain and a 9pc overall valuation gain on the US S&P 500.