How will AI transform enterprises? Learn from those already doing it

Generative AI is a fascinating tech trend — certainly one of the most interesting new technologies I've come across in my 15 years as a professional journalist.

While it's usage has exploded in terms of raw numbers of people around the world, its impact has also been, so far, highly questionable and difficult to quantify.

Unlike the internet and the touchscreen smartphone — two technologies to find immediate, broad use cases by allowing ordinary people to communicate with ease and speed and convenience like never before — AI raises many more questions for its users, us human beings. Among them are:

• What is AI good for, not so good for, best for?
• Is AI a consumer tool, enterprise tool, both, or something else entirely?
• What can we trust AI to do for us and what should we trust it to do?
• How should be using AI, how often, in what contexts and sectors, and for which tasks, in what form factors, and what products?
• Who should be using AI? What kind of training is necessary, how much, how should it be provided, and by whom — model makers or employers?
• Which specific AI models, tools, and workflows are best for which purposes? (A group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley , Anyscale and Canva have proposed a new service called RouteLLM that automatically routes a user's inputs to different models to find the most efficient one in terms of cost/capability. You can try a demo here.)
• How should we integrate AI tools, services, and worfklows into existing organizations in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes opportunity?
• Should enterprise leaders and individuals invest in training their own AI models or building their own AI architectures, or buying/subscribing from others?

Not to mention, the long list of questions about AI ethics (particularly around training data), environmental impacts, security and privacy, that journalists and critics have raised time and time again.

Already, evidence suggests employees and individual entrepreneurs are leading the gen AI adoption curve by turning to AI to help them be more efficient and capable in their existing roles. By and large, that seems like a positive development to me.

But the challenge of business owners in charge of these employees, or even the entrepreneurs themselves, will be ensuring that the "bring your own AI" or BYOAI trend complies with their businesses's goals and does so without compromising workplace security, ethics, and other policies.

The truth is, the current gen AI landscape is much like the "Wild Wild West" of yore, where many are seeking to seize new business opportunities, but with few common rules or best practices exist to guide them.

How should business leaders and technical decision makers navigate this uncharted space?

The journey will be different depending on each organization's specific needs, sectors, and goals, but a great way to find out is to learn from those already doing it at major institutions.

That's exactly what you'll get by coming to the upcoming VB Transform 2024 conference in San Francisco next week.

Our flagship three-day-event, taking place this year on July 9-11 at the Terra Gallery & Event Venue , is posed to have more than 400 attendees for networking and learning opportunities, and more than 70 featured speakers from leading companies in gen AI and using the tech, including:

• Olivier Godement, Head of Product at OpenAI
• Jieliang Hao, Head of Business at Pika
• Desirée Gosby, VP of Emerging Technology at Walmart
• Kari Ann Briski, Vice President of AI Models, Software and Service at NVIDIA
• Zac Maufe, Global Head of Regulated Industries at Google Cloud
• Colette Stallbaumer, WorkLab Cofounder and Copilot GM at Microsoft
• Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity
• Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq

And many, many more. I'll be moderating several sessions myself on AI development and generative AI video in my capacity as executive editor at VentureBeat .

There's still a few tickets remaining here. Get them now before they're gone.

Hope to see you there! Enjoy your weekend.

— Carl Franzen

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