Transcript
Transcript: Trends in Technology-Driven Change: The Hype Surrounding AI
[00:00:00 Text appears onscreen that reads "Trends In Technology-Driven Change".]
[00:00:06 The screen fades to Chris Howard.]
Chris Howard: Hi, I'm Chris Howard. I'm the Global Chief of Research at Gartner. Thanks for taking some time to listen to the advice that we have around A.I. and related subjects. I hope you find it interesting.
[00:00:17 Text appears onscreen that reads "The Hype Surrounding A.I.".]
If you think about generative A.I., despite all the hype and noise about it, what it really is is an interface into information, all kinds of information. This information happens to be Lego bricks that you see here but it could be anything. It could be policy information, okay? It could be other data, like customer data, citizen data, could be anything like that. It really can be used to analyze stuff that it sits on top of, but what I'm going to walk you through here is that in and of itself is not enough. It actually relies on other things that you have in your environment to create value from that.
Okay, so one of the tools that Gartner has to explore a market is called the hype cycle. And so, the way that this works, there's some kind of a trigger. People get interested in something all of a sudden. It reaches a peak of inflated expectations and then it falls into the trough of disillusionment before it eventually reaches productivity, and we're very much at the peak of inflated expectations with generative A.I., if not already coming down into that trough. So, the trough of disillusionment is not like a dystopian hellscape or something. It's just sort of where the work starts. So, we realize what it does, what it doesn't do, what it's good at, how you could use it, and it's an exploratory phase, and I think that's very much where we're headed right now.
[00:01:49 A slide is shown with a graph titled "Current CEO Business Priorities – An Improved Annual Outlook".]
Okay, every year, we do a survey of top leaders, CEOs but CEO equivalents, so there are government representatives in here as well. We do this every year and we ask them this question amongst others, which is, tell us about your business priorities for the next couple of years. What are the things that you're most concerned about? Growth is usually number one here, and growth can be skewed towards the private sector but what it really means here is that you're getting value for the assets that you've invested in. So, this in the case of delivering citizen services would be, okay, how do we sweat those assets and actually deliver more value from those things without having to invest a lot more because money is tighter. The same thing is true in the private sector. So, when CEOs are talking about growth, what they're talking about is richer margin and less about sort of new businesses, more about deepening the business that they have. So, it's those kinds of characteristics.
You see other things on here, like technology-related is number two. Last year, workforce was number two, a lot of concern from senior leaders about whether they had the right employees, they could keep those employees, whether the employee value proposition was strong enough, those types of questions. You have the same questions, right? It's all the same kind of thing. Do I have the right people? How do I motivate them? How do I keep them? And ultimately, they're all tied together. So, the better experiences you give people as an employee, the more likely they are to stay or to be drawn to you, which is partly why I asked the question at the beginning. So, this is a technology that you all kind of have played with in your own personal lives. And then, you start to think, well, can I use that at work? Should that be available to me for the tools that I need? Wouldn't it be easier if I could use these tools? So, the pressure is kind of coming from outside.
What makes this technology different from other trends that I've seen is exactly that fact, the fact that you've all played with it. So, the same was not true for blockchain, right? In this meeting, if I had said this is a blockchain meeting, everybody would have their hands down, right? Same with all the board meetings I've been doing, which is most of what I'm spending my time, almost every board member I interact with, and these are retired people, late career people, the curious people, but they've all played with it, and it creates this really interesting demand pull for the businesses that you work with them, unlike other technologies that we've seen. In fact, I think that generative A.I. is like the browser was in the middle nineties, in that the technologies for the internet existed before the browser came along, but the browser made them useful and everybody could imagine using it. You could imagine using it for business purposes, for social purposes, for all these types of things. It was no longer kind of hidden within the depths of the technical layers. It was actually something that became useful.
With ChatGPT, the same thing happened, which was all of a sudden, it presented itself to you like a person and you could have a conversation with it. That was a very different kind of interaction than having to be a data scientist or somebody that knew a lot about technology who could interact with it easily. My mom, who's in Halifax, is 86. She uses it for genealogy research, whether she realizes it or not, right? She said, wow, this is so much easier to ask questions to, and I can talk to the thing and it gives me better answers, right? The barrier to entry doesn't exist. Anybody can use it, which then poses interesting risks, right? Because people then start to use it with other types of information, maybe use sensitive information. Maybe they're using that and putting it into the tools. They don't mean any harm by doing that but the fact is that early on, like a year and a half ago, it was harmful because public data or private data was getting exposed. So, all of this kind of swimming around.
All right, a little bit more about the CEO survey. We don't give them a list of things to choose from, right? So, this is all verbatim. We code it up and so on. So, of course, the thing we want to know from them is, well, how do you think you're going to accomplish those growth goals? What are some of the technologies that you think are part of it? And this is what they said.
[00:05:30 A slide is shown with a graph titled "The New Technology That CEOs Believe Will Most Significantly Impact Their Industries Over The Next Three Years", and "A.I." is in the lead with a dominant 59%.]
It's like A.I. and nothing else (laughs), way out ahead of this long tail of other capabilities, right? So, it's dominant in senior leader, and it's the same at the top government levels as well. And so, you see, for example, a proposal for A.I. spending from the Canadian government in the budget proposal, other governments around the world, similar kind of work. I'm working now with the OECD in helping advise them on their A.I. rollout strategy and safe A.I. for them, and the government pressure from all of their member countries looks like this chart. It's like, we have to do this, we have to figure it out, and that's kind of where we sit today.
So, that's an optimistic… so, this is part of the hype. This is why generative A.I. is at the top of the hype cycle, is because senior leaders believe it has this kind of value. The reality will settle out in the next couple of years and it will have value. It may not have sort of this extreme kind of value but this creates a potential energy. So, the work is waiting to be released here, and the questions I'm getting from my clients are, okay, we've been experimenting a lot, what do we take forward? What should we implement at scale? Some of this seems promising. Some of it, we're not sure about, and we'll get into some of those details in a minute, but this is both promissory and risky, right? So, the desire to kind of push forward with this in a very aggressive way is really strong. And so, there's a lot of talk about risk of A.I.
So, last year this time, you may remember Sam Altman and others were on Capitol Hill doing testimony, and it was a lot about sort of the existential threat of A.I., that it was not only going to replace jobs but it was harmful to us as a race, as a species, as humans, right? That A.I. was going to become superintelligence of it's own. Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto quit Google for this reason. He wanted to sort of bring attention to this, and that rhetoric has calmed down a fair amount, I think. There's sort of this sort of bubbling still around sort of, what's its relationship to people? And if I bring it into the workforce, are people ready for that? Can they… are they going to work alongside it? Do they feel threatened by that and so on? But I think part of as the hype burns off, people get a more realistic perspective of what the technology is. And so, that's kind of where we are right now, so a lot of experimentation in '23, '24, a smaller number moving into production with things at scale and starting with easy stuff. But the risks are still there, right? So, the risks are still there, so we wanted to know from the same audience, the CEO as well, how do you feel about that risk? Do the benefits outweigh the risk or the other way around? And this is what they said.
[00:08:04 A slide is shown with a graph titled "CEOs' and Sr. Business Execs' View on Risks/Benefits of A.I.".]
87% said the benefits outweigh the risks, and the little inset data there shows that it changed during the year last year. So, when we first asked the question, they still believed the benefits outweighed the risks, but when they gained more experience with the tools, they felt even more strongly about that, that the benefits are going to outweigh the risk. So, again, it's not that they don't think there is risk. It's that they think it can be mitigated. There will be innovation from the community, there will be protection within organizations that apply it that actually mitigate the risk that they're concerned about, but it's still… again, this is a very aggressive push towards implementation. So, are you feeling this within your organization? Not necessarily just about generative A.I. but about artificial intelligence writ large, do you find people that weren't normally talking about technology are starting to talk about A.I., those kinds of things? It's true across every industry that I have.
The other thing that's interesting about this trend, one of the things that I look at to determine what Gartner should cover is, what are people searching for? What are the search trends? What are they looking for? And normally, within the Gartner environment, the most common search term is actually a type of document that Gartner produces called the magic quadrant. What the magic quadrant is, it allows you to kind of see where vendors are placed and who you could choose to buy and work with, that kind of thing. So, magic quadrant is usually the thing that people search for. If you look at the free text searches, that's what it is. But last January, it was displaced by ChatGPT by about four times the volume, and it has stayed that way. It's still that way today. What's happened is that people's understanding has broadened out a bit beyond just ChatGPT, so super dominant but the other thing about it, you'd think, well, it makes sense, technical people are asking those questions. Well, if I take the technical leaders out of that sample, it's stays the same. So, CFOs, heads of HR, heads of risk, heads of supply chain, name your functional leader, are just… their interest is just as high. And so, not only do you have kind of a demand coming from the technical side of the house but from everybody else too.
Thanks for watching. And again, I hope you found this useful and interesting for the work that you're doing in Canada.
[00:10:11 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:10:18 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
