Since ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, it has been a foregone conclusion that generative AI would play a central role — and eventually, perhaps, a dominant one — in future business cycles.
What fewer realized at the time is that AI is also likely to play a central role in business decision-making. It’s not far-fetched to imagine a future date at which top executives rely on artificially intelligent “agents” for guidance on crucial strategic and tactical moves.
AI’s capabilities are especially attractive for leaders in business development, risk management and regulatory compliance, experts say.
“If the notion of driving business growth while at the same time tackling complicated and convoluted regulations were as simple as plugging a query into ChatGPT and receiving a clear, concise answer based on immediate data and analytics to know whether [your company] is fully leveraging its investment in the future of risk oversight and compliance,” regulatory compliance expert Nygina Mills said in a recent YouTube video.
So, what should the business community expect from AI in the near future? What about the farther future, after artificial general intelligence (AGI) has emerged?
AI Will Make Prospecting, Hiring & Strategic Execution More Efficient
Generative AI is already streamlining basic business development functions, including prospecting and other repeatable sales-oriented tasks. It’s also making recruiting and hiring more efficient.
In the very near future, business development leaders will also come to rely on more powerful AI models for assistance with strategy formation and execution. Now is the time to begin thinking about how you’ll integrate these models into decision-making processes and the changes necessary to reduce duplication of effort.
Today’s “Gen AI” Is Not the Endpoint of AI Development
Not long from now, Chat GPT and other large-language “gen AI” models will seem primitive. We don’t know exactly what cutting-edge tools will look like in three or four years, but we can assume they’ll have broader reasoning capabilities and a wider range of practical uses.
As a business development leader, you should begin thinking about what this likely future means for personnel management now. Begin planning an orderly right-sizing before the next contraction forces your hand.
Decision-Makers Can’t Lose Sight of AI Ethics
Future AI models will be even more powerful than today’s. Unfortunately, if we’re not careful, they could be more prone to bias and misinformation as well.
“If you have some form of biases that are injected into the algorithm, you’re likely going to digitally amplify the bias in the software or the AI solution,” says AI expert Mark Esposito. “This becomes problematic when a limitation of a person or a group of people’s mental models now become the norm, or they become standardized.”
This means that even if AI development isn’t their forte, business leaders need to devote resources to “humanizing” models and ensuring they’re not left to reinforce harmful biases.
“The challenge that we have to address is deciding the role of humans and how we make the technology human-centric” so that AI models and outputs are more “defensible and accountable,” Esposito says.
We Must Develop Better AI Guardrails Now, Before We Really Need Them
Bias is one thing. Existential risk from AGI is quite another. Both are worth taking seriously right now.
“There’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over within 20 years and possibly as soon as five years from now,” says neural network pioneer Geoffrey Hinton. That would be an “extinction-level event,” he says, and one that leaders need to address sooner rather than later.
If that sounds alarmist, consider the incredible improvements in AI’s reasoning power just in the past three years, or the fact that “narrow” AI has been far better than humans at many tasks for even longer. It’s not a question of if AI models start to outperform humans on broader measures of reasoning ability, but when.
Charting a Course Into the AI Future
AI presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for business development leaders. On the other hand, it has already brought up a battery of tricky ethical and strategic questions, and will certainly raise even more difficult ones in the near future.
To meet the AI future head-on, business development leaders must be thoughtful yet decisive. While we don’t know exactly what’s coming, we do know that the future will be very different from the past. Those who prepare now will enjoy critical advantages as we move ahead.
