Founder Conversations: A Week of LLM Insights in the Bay Area
Introduction
"Artificial Intelligence will be a bigger shift in our everyday life than electricity or the internet."
— Every LinkedIn influencer in 2023
While the magnitude of the shift can be estimated after the coming years and decades have passed, one thing is clear: we are witnessing the first transformative waves in how humans interact with computers using natural language and how computers can generate information (text, audio, image, video) based on descriptions given in natural language. At the forefront of this revolution is the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a groundbreaking user interface innovation.
Democratization of AI Technology
One of the most significant breakthroughs of GenAI, particularly LLMs, is its democratization of AI technology. Moving beyond the exclusive domain of enterprises with multi-million dollar investments, GenAI has opened the doors to consumers, allowing a more widespread adoption and exploration of AI capabilities. As we at Intentface are in the consultant business, our mission is squarely focused on helping enterprises in navigating this transformation - whether it's about helping companies survive and adapt to this changing environment or leading the change in industry transformation.
Many companies are in the early stages of adopting generative AI, while others have matured in their use and have already introduced GenAI features into the market. However, a common thread among any forward-looking company is that exploring GenAI opportunities has very high priority.
Identifying Opportunities with LLMs
The natural starting point in this journey often involves identifying and leveraging low-hanging fruits—those sweet spots where existing processes can be optimized or automated using LLMs. The benefits of such implementations can be directly quantified against existing business KPIs, such as customer satisfaction or cost efficiency in labor-intensive functions like HR or customer service.
an industry expert would come up with a dozen more [use cases] during a coffee break
Enhancing Services with GenAI
To put it succinctly, the above discussion revolves around feature development powered by GenAI. Consider, for instance, a real-estate agency. There are numerous opportunities to enhance their services, making them better, cheaper, and faster. Let's call these feature development opportunities:
- Automated Property Descriptions: Utilizing LLMs to automatically generate compelling and detailed property descriptions based on a simple list of features and images. This could save significant time for agents and ensure consistency in listings.
- Chatbots for Customer Queries: Implementing AI-powered chatbots on real estate websites to answer common inquiries, schedule viewings, and provide information on properties, thereby enhancing customer service and freeing up time for agents.
- Intelligent Property Matching: Developing an AI system that learns a buyer's preferences through interaction and suggests properties that closely match their criteria, improving the customer experience and efficiency of the property search.
And the list goes on: an industry expert would come up with a dozen more during a coffee break.
While improving current business operations with GenAI is undeniably beneficial and obviously it is the natural starting point, it's imperative to also ponder the future. Will the business landscape remain the same? This leads us to the exciting prospect of thinking beyond mere feature development. How can we leverage technology not just to enhance current business models but to create entirely new ones?
Unlocking New Business Opportunities
The intriguing question then is: What new business opportunities, leveraging current assets and capabilities, can be unlocked with generative AI? For a real-estate agency who has the data of sold properties and their descriptions, upcoming and completed renovations, prices, buyer and seller preferences, informal discussions between agents and customers - all this in unstructured form - what are the business models unlocked by GenAI?
I don't have an answer for the question above, but I'm confident that the answer can be found. That's the value we can bring to our customers: not only implementing the GenAI solutions - developing features - but also helping to evaluate the best ways to unlock the full potential of the technology and leading the industry transformation.