Generative AI in Market & Competitive Intelligence
Generative AI is the talk of the town with the business and trade press being full of articles about possible use cases, potential savings and the impact on the world of work.
According to the Gartner 2023 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, Generative AI is at the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. Bill Gates has written in a blog post that artificial intelligence is “as revolutionary as mobile phones and the internet” and should be seen as part of a series of transformative technological innovations that will fundamentally change the way we interact with information and digital technology. Companies are feeling the pressure to face this new technology. And as for the large companies, at least, many of them launched respective pilot projects last year, mostly in the form of companyGPTs.
On behalf of our customers, SVP has also carried out benchmarking analyses around this topic. In the future, however, this technology will permeate all areas and there will hardly be a text field without a language model behind it to support the user.
In view of this hype and the expected fundamental changes, 65 per cent of Germans consider AI to be the most important technology of the future, according to a recent BITKOM study, and three quarters of those surveyed even believe that AI will be crucial in determining whether German companies will remain successful globally in the future.
How important is the use of AI in Germany?
It is, therefore, all the more surprising that the adoption of AI in German companies is very slow. Only 3 per cent of the companies surveyed are already using generative AI and only 6 per cent are planning to implement it this year. To make things worse, more than half of the companies have not included the adoption of generative AI on their future agenda.
Strongly data-driven business areas such as corporate, market and competitive intelligence are by nature facing particularly great challenges from artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, therefore, AI was a hot topic at the Cimicon DACH conference, which has recently taken place in Berlin. Jan Pilhar from IBM iX presented important use cases for AI.
Important use cases for AI
- Generative Search/Chat with your data: Querying all data sources in “natural language”, which also entails a “democratisation of data” and means classic intelligence functions such as BI have to reposition themselves.
- Summarising content: Complex and large sets of information that is almost impossible to deal with may in future be processed automatically, making it simple to access and to find relevant individual pieces of information more easily.
- Report generation: In the future, it will be possible to automatically generate reports of different lengths, with and without graphics and according to different criteria from rather unstructured data or texts. Moreover, it is expected that the currently very popular dashboards will evolve towards dashboards on the fly.
- Strategy/scenario planning: Automated suggestions of possible scenarios based on existing information on the market and competitive situation.
- Synthetic data: can be generated if sufficient original data is unavailable. This is a major topic in autonomous driving, for example, which SVP also dealt with intensively last year. Synthetic data is used in marketing, too, with customer data being scaled up or, if data cannot be used for legal reasons, “fake data”, which has the same statistical correlations and whose use is unproblematic, is generated.
- Simplification of data integration: In the future, models on the fly will be able to write their own code to start database queries so that data integration and respective projects will no longer be needed.
As a market and competitive service provider, SVP is naturally also working intensively on the topic of AI. We are testing tools, particularly in the use cases Chat with your data, Summarising content and Report Generation, and have already implemented tools for the first two use cases. We are very excited to see what changes AI will bring to MICI departments and service companies in the near future.
Norman Pirngruber, Market Intelligence Senior Expert
Sources:
- BITKOM: Deutsche Unternehmen zögern bei ChatGPT & Co., 28.02.2024
- BITKOM: KI gilt den Deutschen als entscheidend für die Zukunft, 10.04.2024
- Jan Pilhar, IBM iX: Generative AI – Das “Next Big Thing” für Corporate Intelligence, Vortrag auf der CHIMICON DACH, 24.03.2024
- Gartner Hype Cycle for Emergin Technologies, August 2023
- Heise Onlie: Was Bill Gates über die Zukunft von KI denkt, 13.07.2023
