Most companies recognize that aggressive adoption of digital technologies is increasingly critical to being competitive. Our research shows that the top 10% of early adopters of digital technologies have grown at twice the rate of the bottom 25%, and that they are using cloud systems — not legacy systems — to enable adoption, a trend we expect to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years. Many laggard and middle-of-the-pack companies, by comparison, are dramatically underestimating the cloud resources they will need in order to access, power, or train a new generation of intelligent applications presaged by breakthroughs like GPT-3, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tool.
The Next Big Breakthrough in AI Will Be Around Language
The 2020s are going to bring major advances in language-based AI tasks. GPT-3, a state-of-the-art natural language processing tool developed by OpenAI, will soon be able to produce short stories, songs, press releases, technical manuals, text in the style of particular writers, and even computer code. Cloud-AI services will enable the development of a new class of enterprise apps that are more creative (or “generative” — the “G” in GPT) than anything we’ve seen before. They will make the process of synthesizing words, intentions, and information in language cheaper, which will make many business activities more efficient, stimulating growth and innovation. In light of these coming changes, companies will not only need to rethink IT resources, but also human resources. They can begin by analyzing the bundles of tasks in current roles, uncovering specific tasks that the AI can augment, and unleashing technical and non-technical workers alike to innovate faster. The time to prepare is now.