Technology doesn’t really take off until it reaches its ‘high-tech high-touch” stage — that is, it becomes accessible, friendly, and yes, fun, to users in a big way. That concept, spun by late author and futurist John Naisbitt in his seminal work Megatrends back in the 1980s, held true for PC computing back then, just as it holds true for artificial intelligence today. (He was a futurist, after all.) The more technology-driven and data-driven organizations become, the more their success depends on the human experience.
That view, as seen from the current AI wave, is shared by Brian MacCarthy, senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and managing director of Booz Allen Ventures. “Every important innovation has become world-changing when it became personal,” he explains. “The car became personal with the Model T. Computing became personal with the PC. AI became personal with ChatGPT. When technologies become personal, they become useful to every one of the eight billion-plus people of the planet instead of being primarily a tool for a small group of people who work for enterprises or governments.”
Just as the PC changed the world several decades ago, AI is poised to change the way we formulate and facilitate our ideas for working, living, and interacting. Now, with AI accessible to all, we have “eight billion potential users who can turn these new innovations into massive levers that change the world in all kinds of unforeseen ways,” says MacCarthy.
What MacCarthy aptly calls “personal AI” has led to a boom in new companies,” he continues. “The barrier to starting a business has been lowered by AI. Today, AI can help founders navigate the operational issues of a new business, create marketing assets, build customer service, code, and reach out to prospects. Every part of the value chain has AI tools that can empower a founder to do more.”
How exactly does AI reshape and accelerate the path to business creation and innovation? For starters, large language models “can help draft negotiation emails to vendors or landlords, guide founders on how to improve their conversion rate, and in general be a sounding board to the most difficult operational and technical questions a founder might have — no matter their distance from Silicon Valley,” says MacCarthy. “Founders can prompt their LLMs to respond with advice that Marc Andreessen — or any other Silicon Valley titan — might give in that situation.”
The possibilities are only limited by the imaginations of business leaders. “One new startup is using generative AI to enable artists, photographers, and marketers to take their existing portfolios and create new digital assets in their own style,” MacCarthy relates. “Think a different pose for a photoshoot or a new set of marketing assets designed around a holiday.”
Another startup, he adds, “is using generative AI to help companies that go after government contracts write better proposals, faster.”
AI doesn’t just help startups, of course — it is a valuable tool for reinventing existing businesses. “It also accelerates the speed at which businesses can produce value for their customers,” MacCarthy says.
For entrepreneurs and executives alike, it’s important to keep in mind that AI is but a tool — not a magic wand that can be waved over every situation. “AI is a force multiplier,” he explains. “You still need to aim but you can do more and go farther than ever before.”
AI is simply statistics on steroids: “every LLM uses probabilities to produce the next word in their response to your prompt,” says MacCarthy. “These probabilities summed up are not just statistics — but in essence a highly compressed working model of the world. As a result, any innovation or new idea that ChatGPT can come up with is totally reliant on the interaction of the user and the model via the prompt.”
That’s where the imagination must be applied. Not too long ago, someone prompted OpenAI’s DALL-E “to produce a piece of concept furniture — an avocado chair — a chair designed to resemble the avocado’s shape, its green interior and darker exterior, its large seed,” he illustrates. Without interjecting such human imagination, “a chair manufacturer might ask ChatGPT for ‘three ways to improve my chair business.’ The answers might include increasing prices, improving customer service, lowering costs. But avocado chairs would not make it on the list.”
The essence of this, again, is that AI is but a tool, that can help humans bend, shape, and experiment with new ways of doing things. “AI is a product of human ingenuity – not a replacement of it,” MacCarthy emphasizes. “But there are risks to delegating more and more of our original thinking to LLMs. In the same way that having access to Google Search can subconsciously wire us to delegate some of our memory to digital tools, access to LLMs can wire us to delegate more of our thinking to AI.”
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