AI and business: Should you appoint a Chief AI Officer?

Are you up to date with AI? Let's be honest. How could you be? The industry is moving so fast even specialists are struggling.

There’s ChatGPT, the essay-writing engine that even your grandmother's heard about. There are 14 official plug-ins so far to explore, including FiscalNote which provides real-time market and legal data. 

Google launched a rival called Bard. 

Maybe you’ve seen Adobe’s new image generator called Firefly? It’s incorporated into Photoshop; input a picture, draw a wider boundary, and Firefly guesses the missing bits. And boy, is it good.

Watch Firefly in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ziOUKgfxM

In the five days alone before writing this article we saw the launch of Meta’s MusicGen AI that can turn text prompts or music clips into full songs. It’s a rival to Google’s MusicLM. When you need a soundtrack to a corporate video you can use either tool to create something copyright-free and ideally suited to your needs.

Amazon Review AI creates product summaries using customer reviews – useful to any company selling on Amazon. 

Stability AI, producer of the image generator engine Stable Diffusion, launched Uncrop, which creatively expands existing images, imagining what would go in the new space, just like Adobe Firefly. It’s a one-click interface, so simpler than the Adobe model. 

For video there is Runway Gen-2, which creates high-resolution video via text prompts. Corporate videos, and maybe in the future entire movies, will be made this way. 

To repeat: this is just the progress made in five days

These are new tools to add to the plethora already available. There’s Krisp.AI which helps with meeting notes, Writesparkle.AI to optimise workflow, Durable.co to help create websites, Gamma.app to generate presentations, SheetAI.app for AI-powered Excel. 

In San Francisco, there have been 44 publicly advertised AI events in over two weeks. One entrepreneur noted, “I need to send AI agents to attend all of these events on my behalf.”

So the question for managers is: how to deal with this deluge of AI? 

• Management in a post-AI world according to CMI Companions