Last week Paolo Cervini, member of the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2023 and Co-lead of Capgemini Invent’s Management Lab, shared his experiences and lessons learned using Generative AI for platform strategies.
Paolo explained how Generative AI can be used as a Co-Thinker to support assessing strategic options and making decisions in organisations, easing the practical implementation of theories. He highlighted how crucial the human role is for quality results and control, and how important it now is for public institutions to take a leading role fast to ensure Generative AI is further developed in line with our values and ethics. He advises organizations to start immediately experimenting with Generative AI and to expect major shifts in business and society.
Generative AI can be used as a Co-Thinker to support assessing strategic options and making decisions in organisations, easing the practical implementation of theories.
As a practical example Paolo Cervini and Marshall Van Alstyne are working on a prototype for assessing Network Effects: helping to identify and prioritise network effects, define actions to implement them, understand the social responsibility impact of the network effects and help with mitigation actions required regarding the impacts.
Content provided by Generative AI is now good, but not great. It has the breadth but not yet the depth needed for complex strategic topics with many trade-offs. Therefore it serves as a good starting point, but human interaction, expertise and critical thinking is crucial for quality results.
Using Generative AI as a Co-Thinker requires a lot of effort in prompt sequencing, content injection and educating the machine, which luckily can be done by specialists without any coding expertise.
There is a large risk that the machine looks so smart that the human only agrees, which is dangerous as the machine now can transform its thinking into decisions and actions. It is important that the human is involved and exercises good judgment in the process.
To improve the capability of good judgment with AI, organizations need to provide access to their employees to experiment and improve their understanding of how thinking and behavior needs to change. Furthermore, it's important to understand that good judgment in this context is a process, and a balance is needed between decentralized and distributed access with controls on areas such as level of access, privacy, security and ethics.
It is crucial now to know who is going to shape the AI and make sure the content, context and teaching is done consistently with our values and ethics. Guidance and actions are needed now, not later.
Looking at the future, AI makes platform strategies and ecosystem mindset even more relevant than before, while bringing even more regulations to the space. Generative AI can even change the platform dynamics through machine-generated network effects.
Based on the experiments and experience of Paolo, his key advice for platform businesses who are interested in using generative AI for their business is to:
Experiment.
Expect a major shift for business and societies.
Be aware of how values will impact the performance of AI.
Watch the full recording of this Talk in our community.
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