By Anil Nair, Founder, ThinkStreet
If the World Economic Forum is right, over 80% of companies will adopt generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) by 2025. McKinsey estimates that the impact of GenAI could add the equivalent of $2.6-4.4 trillion annually. At its peak, that’s more than the 2024 GDP of Japan ($4.3 trillion), Germany ($3.9 trillion), India ($3.4 trillion), or the UK ($2.7 trillion).
Google recently commissioned market research firm Kantar to survey the Indian market for driving the adoption of its GenAI, Gemini. Not surprisingly, the survey, covering 8,000 people across 18 cities, showed that 60% are not familiar with GenAI tools, and only 30% have tried using one. People sought to boost productivity (72%), be more creative (77%), and communicate better (73%) in their daily lives with GenAI tools.
Research consistently shows that GenAI tools can dramatically improve individual productivity. Greater than the dominant concern of GenAI devouring jobs is the matter of not knowing how to use such tools. This seriously limits opportunities and career growth. The competitive disadvantage will span communication, critical thinking, and creativity. It will also cause job dissatisfaction owing to continuing mundane tasks and from being perceived as a laggard in a rapidly transforming, AI-driven workforce.
At an organisational sense, lower levels of innovation could slow product development, and ignoring data-driven insights could hamper agility. Organisations could suffer from the disruption of business models, product commoditisation, higher costs, dwindling customer allegiance, and the erosion of competitive positioning.
To get started on the GenAI journey, it’s good to know what various tools are best for. The following is a short list.
ChatGPT is great for creative writing, generic responses, fluency, and diverse content styles, resolving creative block. Domain-specific accuracy is not a standout.
Scribe helps build documents that assist with training new hires, create statements of purpose, answer customer queries, and embed images and GIFs as necessary.
TensorFlow, an open-source library, provides a wide range of resources for training GenAI models across platforms, including APIs and frameworks. Bard’s greatest benefit is that it leverages Google’s search capabilities, ideal for fact-based answers and research. Gemini too does that and also supports multilingual content creation.
Claude is best for language comprehension, information retrieval, rephrasing, and ethical outputs. Claude 3 stands out for understanding visual formats, including images alongside text.
MidJourney leads in image generation for artworks, while Dall-E excels at producing realistic images from textual descriptions, enabling concept visualisation.
Adobe Firefly is good for professional designs, offering seamless integration with Adobe tools and AI-driven templates. It also aids social media design formats.
Canva is ideal for drag-and-drop interfaces and AI-assisted suggestions, enabling professional grade graphic design and enhanced presentation quality. GitHub Copilot enhances developer productivity with real-time coding suggestions and supports multiple coding languages, while Microsoft Copilot provides AI-assisted coding and integrates with Microsoft 365.
Meanwhile, academia is trying to keep pace and remain relevant. This is reflected in the revision of curricula to ensure AI literacy, using AI tools in teaching, personalising learning experiences, and the introduction of AI specialisations. The situation is forcing other favourable developments too, like interdepartmental collaboration across computer science, social sciences, and humanities, and industry partnerships that allow insights into real-world practices.
The Stanford AI Index Report puts India among the top countries, evaluating nations on various parameters including research and development, responsible AI, economy, education, infrastructure, and public opinion. A 2022 Unesco State of Education Report says that India has the highest relative AI skill penetration rate. The report also points out, paradoxically, that India’s policy framework is deficient.
Nonetheless, the Central Board of Secondary Education introduced AI as a subject for Class 9 students back in 2019, extending it to Class 11 students subsequently. Vis-à-vis engineering, the Indian Institutes for Technology have taken a lead, including AI at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Carnegie Mellon offered the world’s first bachelor’s degree in AI in 2018. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, ETH Zurich, National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University Singapore, and many other universities of repute now offer dedicated AI programmes.
Anurag Shukla, director at Brhat, a policy think tank, alerted us to the downsides in a recent article. He says, “Professors everywhere are facing a generation of students who carry ‘instant answers’ in their pocket, bypassing the struggle that deep thinking, reflection, and real learning demand.” The bigger question he asks is: “But what do we make of this shift to outsourcing thought?” In his view, “We are witnessing a silent, collective decline of attention span, memory, and conceptual depth.”
I guess the answer lies in using technology thoughtfully, by ensuring pedagogical assessments evaluate the learner’s thinking process, analytical abilities, and arguments, rather than just the right answer. We must incorporate deep discussions and information synthesis from multiple sources in learning, sharpening metacognitive skills, and fostering intellectual curiosity. Most importantly, guidance on using such tools ethically should be offered.
The idealistic answer, arguably, may lie in India’s traditional knowledge. If we consider it to be a living repository of wisdom, we must seek perspectives there for navigating today’s challenges. By integrating these rich traditions in our academia, work, and approaches to technology, we can foster a creatively inspired, technically proficient, and ethically grounded generation that’s deeply and proudly connected to our intellectual heritage.