Asking around: How will generative AI impact the workplace?

The rapid evolution and adoption of generative AI tools has arguably been the most talked about tech development of 2023, and AI’s increasing integration into business functions has raised many important questions. Chief among them: Will the increasing capabilities and offerings lead to a workplace of copilots, executive assistants, translators, and efficiency makers, or will they lead to an office full of, well, junk?

“If you use a cheaper model, you can get a lot of garbage. Like, a lot of garbage” said Quazi Nafiul Islam, developer advocate at the software developer Sonar.

This brings us to IT Brew’s Question of the Week: What role do you envision generative AI playing in the workplace of the future? In search of answers, we turned to Islam and four other IT pros.

The responses below are excerpts from longer conversations.

Quazi Nafiul Islam, developer advocate, Sonar

Generative AI can play a pretty significant role, as long as you put in the money and the compute resources to use a good model. If you just think any old model with very few parameters can generate useful information, I do not think so.

Pete Deros, senior director, Coalfire

If you don’t have prompt controls, if you don’t have good access controls on that [large language model], now all your corporate information could theoretically be harvested from a single interaction with said LLM that you’ve implemented. And a lot of people don’t understand that—that if I feed all that data into it, it can now regurgitate all that data back out...There’s a lot of danger that people are implementing this technology before they fully understand it.

Beena Ammanath, technology trust ethics leader, Deloitte

Imagine a scenario that you and I spoke completely different languages; we didn’t have a common language to communicate in. But we each would have our own assistant. Say, I’m speaking in German, and you only understand English. I’m speaking in German, but you would hear it in English in my voice. And that’s AI in the background, making that communication seamless for us. I think we will each have an assistant that will help us work better, faster, more effectively.

Luke Tenery, partner, StoneTurn

In a word, I see greater convergence. I see some of the AI capabilities really allowing certain organizations to scale with capabilities that they wouldn’t have otherwise...A smart expert user of a GPT-like app can shorten their time exponentially to generate work product. And so I think smart organizations that do that, converge it with their existing capabilities and knowledge bases, the ones that do that smartly, will scale and continue to be competitive.

Daren Orzechowski, global co-head of technology, Allen & Overy

I think it’s an efficiency tool that will help different jobs work a little bit differently, but also get done more efficiently. And in my own industry, in the legal space, I always use the example of when online computer legal research came about. That changed how people went from doing book research to doing online research. There’s more lawyers now than there were then, right? So, you just changed the way in which people work.