Yesterday brought an announcement from Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) that they have a line of sight to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In this announcement, Sam Altman noted that, in 2025, we may start to see AI agents join the workforce. As a business leader, you may be wondering what this frenetic pace of AI innovation means for your business. One place to start is to ask – is my organization AI Native?
AI Adoption Best Practices – Past and Present
Before the recent arrivals of Generative AI and Large Language Models, adopting AI in an organization focused on finding an important business problem that AI can assist with, building or leveraging an AI model for this problem, and iterative improvement of the solution. While this remains a good goal, the ubiquity of productivity improvement AIs in the last few years has created another adoption opportunity – leveraging AI in the everyday operations of your business and work.
Analogies
To understand what it means to be AI Native, consider other examples. Depending on what your business does, it is still safe to say that in this day, many businesses are phone native and internet native.
- Your employees know how to use phones and the internet as needed to do their jobs as effectively as possible.
- You have some rules on proper usage of these technologies (such as not putting company private data on the internet), provide some tools for all employees to use, and rely on employee selection for other tools.
- You assume that an employee knows how to use these tools and how to be productive with them.
Imagine your business for a day without these tools. How much less productive would you be?
What Does AI Native Mean?
Armed with these analogies, we can start to define AI Native. I consider an AI Native organization to be one where AI exists seamlessly at every level and aspect of the business, with humans using AI tools to accelerate, offload and automate any part of the business for which the tools generate value. Much like phones and the internet, humans will decide when and how to use AI, and will understand enough about the tools to decide what to do and how to do it.
Levels Of AI Native
As you begin to consider either introducing or expanding your AI footprint, consider the following levels to assess where you are and where you can go in each part of your business.
- Level 0: Employees do not use AI anywhere.
- Level 1: Employees do the work with various tools, and manually consult an AI (such as ChatGPT) to get answers or learn how to do things.
- Level 2: AI does some of the steps of a workflow autonomously, in collaboration with humans.
- Level 3: AI does end-to-end workflows autonomously, with oversight by humans.
Getting Started
The key is to understand what workflows exist in your business, how much automation with AI can help, what level of AI-Native each section of your business is at, and how to work with your teams to brainstorm what the next level of AI Native means to them.
It is also worth noting that becoming AI Native will be as much of a cultural shift in a business as remote work, cell phones, or the internet were. Employees will need support on how to be successful with AI, how to measure success, and how do operate safely and ethically. Also given the sheer volume of new AI technologies and the pace at which new AI technologies develop, just helping your employees know what is out there can help drive effective adoption.
It will be a continual and iterative journey, but getting started will help your business reap the benefits of AGI or whatever else comes our way.
