Bionic Business

For anyone in business, there’s no escaping the noise — and the signal — around AI, and generative AI in particular. Will it transform business? What will that mean for workers, for business owners, for shareholders and investors? Or is it being overhyped, and in a few years time will be relegated to a storyline that sits alongside NFTs and Blackberries? Consensus is that there will be a transformation - if not multiple transformations - but no one knows what those look like. Everyone appears to be experimenting with tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, but it’s still early days when it comes to anyone realising tangible results. At the same time, business pressures don’t go away: there are ever-present demands to be efficient, to meet and exceed expectations, whichever tools one uses to do that. So how can AI be a boon and not a burden to these businesses? How can these technologies augment and not distract businesses and their workers? Bionic Business is a weekly newsletter that explores this tension: between using AI capability and improving business productivity.