The power of generative AI for IT leaders — how to leverage it for efficiency
From fast-paced change to the increasing complexity of systems and processes, and security threats to compliance best practices, IT leaders face a range of challenges today. But Adobe believes generative AI is the key to unlocking productivity and efficiency to overcome these hurdles.
And we’re not the only ones. According to a recent report, 86% of IT leaders see a key role for generative artificial intelligence in the future.
It’s an exciting time, and Adobe is a prime example of how humans are both the drivers and the beneficiaries of the promise of these tools. Let’s discuss how generative AI can be used for significant efficiency gains — assuming you have the right partners to help you safely and ethically implement them.
What is generative AI, and why does it matter?
Generative AI is a set of artificial intelligence technologies capable of interpreting and generating text, images, video, audio, and other media based on prompts. ChatGPT or DALL-E are a couple of well-known examples.
While this technology is undeniably changing the game for marketers and designers who can create assets faster than ever, the benefits of generative AI aren’t limited to creatives.
IT leaders can reap the benefits too, using the tool as a force multiplier to create new and ingenious solutions.
The power of this technology lies in its ability to better leverage the existing expertise in your organization — empowering you to channel these capabilities into innovative, targeted applications. At Adobe, we’ve experienced three key benefits of using generative AI:
- Streamlined customer workflows to reduce time to market and time to insights by enabling rapid ideation, creation, and analysis
- Shifted the focus of our customers’ organizations from low-value, high-effort tasks to high-value, high-impact efforts
- Unlocked previously non-scalable capabilities
When strategically deployed, generative AI amplifies the returns on both human and technical investments, driving growth and efficiency.
Here’s how to reap those rewards.
How to leverage generative AI for efficiency
As an IT leader, your primary focus for generative AI should be on upgrading the capabilities in software development to dramatically reduce manual efforts in IT operations. And that’s one of our key focuses for Adobe customers too.
Adobe has been working on integrating generative AI models into martech stacks and enterprise applications, orchestrating how they interoperate with each other and existing AI. We then build endpoints into workflows to increase our customers’ workforce productivity.
Studies have already shown that deploying generative AI tools in this way can greatly increase efficiency among low performers and drive innovation among high performers. At a Fortune 500 company, for example, customer service workers with access to AI tools became 14% more productive on average than those who did not, with the least skilled or newest workers benefiting from a 35% efficiency gain. By working with Adobe and our Professional Services team, we can help you replicate that success.
Case study — automating customer service scripts
Adobe is leading the enterprise space with generative AI. Our underlying technology embeds generative AI capabilities across the entire Adobe stack. This means our customers can simply build on it to enjoy the benefits, pairing the skills they already have in their enterprise with the expert guidance of our Professional Services team.
As an example, we’re currently working with a telecommunications client who wants to increase the effectiveness of their customer call centers.
Using a speech-to-text AI model, they transcribe all the calls from their customer help centers. They identified the most effective ones, reviewed and modified them, and summarized them into actionable scripts. These are then pulled into a vector database and made searchable, allowing customer service workers to generate a new script using a simple prompt in a matter of seconds.
Let’s say the customer service worker wants to generate a new call script for activating an iPhone. They enter the internal interface, search “how to activate an iPhone,” and a high-quality script will automatically be generated, triggering a review and publishing process. They can then better resolve customer issues, providing expert guidance for faster resolution and higher customer satisfaction. Studies done by Stanford and MIT on similar call center use cases have shown a 14% productivity gain overall, with a 35% increase for low performers.
The efficiency gains don’t end there, though. The strength of employing generative AI is that content production becomes not only more effective but scalable, making other teams more efficient too.
Using the example above, generative AI could be used by a marketing team to create a blog post entitled How to Activate an iPhone using the same content baseline as a source. The blog could then be shared on their app as part of a customer FAQ or help page or published online to rank organically and appear in Google search results. This allows the telecom company to offer more support to customers while reducing the number of direct inquiries to their call center. The result is a better customer experience and increased efficiency for the business.
Considerations of generative AI as an IT leader
As a leader in generative AI, Adobe is hyper-aware of the ethical concerns that come with it, including bias, reliability, privacy, and security. Fortunately, people are the driving force behind generative AI innovation, so we can guide its implementation to ensure that these tools are accessible, safe, and moderated, helping to drive equitable and impactful outcomes.
When looking to embed generative AI capacities across your tech stack, start by asking:
- As an organization, do we have the skills, AI practitioners, and leaders to leverage generative AI technology?
- Will implementing generative AI enhance user experience and deliver tangible benefits?
- How can we make this technology’s application relevant to our business and customers?
- Can we adequately moderate training inputs and generated outputs to ensure consistency with our brand’s voice and values?
- Can we continually monitor and address data safety, brand integrity, and rights management?
- Do we have mitigations in place for model bias?
If you can’t answer these questions positively but still want to make the most of our technology’s full capabilities, you could benefit from the support of Adobe Professional Services to implement generative AI safely and ethically.
Kick-start your generative AI implementation
By working with Adobe Professional Services, you not only benefit from our technology but from our help through the planning, implementation, activation, adoption, and optimization of the platform. It’s the easiest way to get the most out of the generative AI capabilities embedded within it.
Based on your technology stack, we help you build a business transformation plan and
architect solutions to bring future capabilities to your business. We help you lay the foundations, providing onboarding and knowledge sharing to ensure your teams can use generative AI to be more efficient and more innovative.
If you’re ready to find out more, get in touch with Adobe Professional Services experts. We enhance your customer experience through future-proof improvements to the systems, strategies, and technologies your business uses every day.
Ash King is a seasoned consulting executive and a strategic advocate of AI technologies with over 10 years of experience advising teams and founders on incorporating AI into enterprise and non-commercial use cases. With a team of over 60 individuals developing and using generative AI tools, he applies practical experience to deliver value-driven outcomes for enterprise customer engagements. His methodology includes capitalizing on customer insights to sharpen Adobe's generative AI perspective and enterprise services. He's committed to making generative AI an instrumental and beneficial part of enterprise tech stacks.