GenAI Shift from Experimentation to Implementation: Unlocking Business Potential

GenAI Shift from Experimentation to Implementation: Unlocking Business Potential

GenAI, a technology that has quietly evolved over the last eighteen months, is now at the cusp of a breakthrough in the business world. Its transformative potential could revolutionize operations, sparking a new era of efficiency and innovation. But are we satisfied with GenAI’s current experimental phase, or are we ready to propel it into full-scale integration, where its potential can be harnessed by businesses?

As companies gear up to incorporate GenAI into their operations, they find themselves in a transitional phase—still experimenting while aiming for seamless integration. The right approach can demystify the journey and make it more manageable, from initial sandboxing to full-fledged GenAI integration. The role of decision-makers in this transition is not just crucial; it’s empowering as they face challenges such as scaling up, aligning with existing technologies, and rallying the team around this new frontier.

To bring the above philosophy to life, Tech Mahindra has developed the Generative AI Studio. Leveraging Microsoft AI, the Generative AI Studio is a multi-model, multi-modal, and multi-cloud GenAI experimentation playground to evaluate technology feasibility around the processing of documents, code, images, videos, audio, and data. Currently, it offers over 60 prebuilt experiments/capabilities and supports over 20 AI model families. The studio has also codified prompt engineering to reduce randomness in responses. By standardizing content generation using Natural Language Processing (NLP), the studio also provides significant benefits for enterprises.

Tech Mahindra and Microsoft have co-developed several solutions for the IT industry. One such solution, Evangelize Pair Programming, helps enterprises speed up delivery timelines by reducing software quality issues. This solution accelerates developer velocity and learning, enhances standardization and code accuracy with real-time code suggestions. It also turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages. Additionally, it accelerates cost-effective modernization of legacy systems while also aiding development of new applications.

Tech Mahindra will help enterprises understand nuances of pair programming technology options, its benefits and way to bring change management within organization. It will help enterprises to create a structured approach to scale pair programming evolution. Adoption of pair programming will help enterprises achieve improved developer productivity. Tech Mahindra’s know-how of customer context and in-depth expertise in generative AI technology will help enterprises fully leverage the power of AI in their context. “

Besides, our GenAI-powered Enterprise Knowledge Search helps businesses unleash knowledge accessibility in a unique way, which eventually improves the knowledge quotient within organizations. We have built amplifAIers, powered by GenAI, to deliver complex AI and analytics projects faster and better.

Recognizing the Shift: Signs of Transition

Amidst the innovation buzz, how do you recognize the subtle signs of transitioning from experimentation to robust integration? Increased investment often serves as a telltale sign, reflecting a company’s commitment to embracing GenAI as a core component of its strategy. Assembling dedicated AI teams further underscore this shift, indicating a move beyond pilot projects, toward scalable solutions. Operational integration, witnessed through the deployment of GenAI tools in day-to-day workflows, also signals a deeper commitment to this transformative technology.

It means shifting from isolated use cases to a holistic approach, where GenAI enhances various business facets. It’s beyond a chatbot handling customer queries; it’s an intelligent system optimizing supply chain logistics, improving predictive maintenance, and driving personalized marketing campaigns. This approach offers a competitive advantage, reducing costs, improving efficiency, and enhancing customer satisfaction. However, a clear vision and strategic alignment across the organization are required to realize these benefits.

Overcoming Challenges: Navigating the Terrain

How do organizations navigate GenAI integration while managing costs, mitigating risks, and ensuring scalability? Cost management is crucial, requiring a balance between innovation and fiscal prudence. One strategy is model fine-tuning, which involves making subtle adjustments to a GenAI model to improve performance. It can offer cost efficiency without sacrificing quality. Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) present another challenge, necessitating robust frameworks tailored to AI’s unique demands.

Organizations must conduct regular audits, train staff on ethical AI use, and adopt a proactive stance on regulatory concerns, including understanding and anticipating future legislative changes. Scalability is paramount, requiring agile infrastructures to accommodate evolving data and user demands. Building scalable AI infrastructures, leveraging cloud-based platforms for flexibility, and implementing modular systems that scale in phases is critical for future proofing GenAI deployments, ensuring long-term sustainability and success.

Real-World Examples: Learning from the Pioneers

Real-world examples can serve as a beacon of inspiration. For instance, a leading telecom company implemented an internal chatbot powered by GenAI across all functions, significantly enhancing customer service and operational efficiency. This success story is not just a testament to GenAI’s potential; it’s a source of confidence, paving the way for more extensive GenAI integration.

Similarly, an oil and gas industry leader integrated GenAI into its data analysis processes, optimizing resource management and predictive maintenance. By focusing on ‘high-ROI use cases’ or GenAI applications that offer the highest ROI, the company paved the way for broader adoption across the organization. These examples highlight the importance of identifying and prioritizing high-value applications of GenAI, which can serve as catalysts for broader integration and more significant organizational transformation.

Tech Mahindra has tapped into the capability of OpenAI to transform the customer experience for a leading communications services provider in the UK. Amongst multiple initiatives to improve the current client engagement across existing channels, we have piloted a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Voice Assistant.

Tech Mahindra and Microsoft further helped identify a catalog of use cases and customer journeys where this “Digital Assistant” can be employed. This initiative is expected to ease the customer interaction journey, thus positively impacting the overall customer experience with the brand.

Ensuring Scalability: Building for the Future

Scalability lies at the heart of GenAI’s transformative potential. How can organizations ensure their AI initiatives meet evolving demands and opportunities? The answer lies in starting small but thinking big. Organizations can mitigate risks and maximize returns by initiating pilot projects to prove value before scaling incrementally. This phased approach allows for learning and adjustment, ensuring the final implementation is robust and effective.

Leveraging cloud technologies offers another avenue for scalability, providing the flexibility and resources needed to support growing AI workloads. Architecting for growth, emphasizing modular components and flexible architectures, further enhances scalability while future proofing GenAI investments. Cloud platforms offer scalability and advanced tools and services that can accelerate development and deployment, reduce time to market and increase overall agility.

Best Practices for Integration: Seamlessly Bridging the Gap

Integrating GenAI into existing systems and processes requires a nuanced approach. The key lies in comprehensive data strategies encompassing data cleaning, management, and governance. Organizations can ensure that GenAI initiatives are built on a solid foundation by developing a holistic understanding of their data landscape. It involves collecting and storing data efficiently and ensuring its quality and relevance for AI applications.

Continual improvement is equally essential, necessitating regular updates and refinements based on feedback and new data. By embracing a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, they can maximize the value GenAI investments while staying ahead of the curve. This ongoing evaluation and enhancement process helps keep AI systems relevant and effective, delivering sustained value over time.

Tech Mahindra and Microsoft’s other collaborative solutions include GenAI-powered ‘Enterprise Knowledge Search’ and ‘Document amplifAIer’ under Tech Mahindra’s TechM amplifAI0->∞ suite of AI offerings. Unlocking the full value of the documents and harnessing the capabilities of large-scale, GenAI models, Document amplifAIer facilitates centralized and minimal-touch document interpretation, information capture, and overall document handling across business functions in an organization. This solution helps enterprises ingest documents originating from various customer-facing, middle-office, or back-office business functions and extract required information leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI large models to automate subsequent actions. It can automate a variety of incoming structured and unstructured documents, dynamically navigating and addressing a range of complex information in documents.

GenAI helps minimize the custom training needs, a major challenge in AI adoption for document handling. The solution has a future-ready framework to combine numerous patterns of document consumption including summary, search, query, etc.  It is also applicable to almost all business functions in an enterprise and will trigger productivity, faster turnaround time, processing consistency, and lesser human dependency.

Our Generative AI-powered Enterprise Search, integrated with Microsoft, helps enterprises increase effectiveness and personalization to unlock the full potential of enterprise data and present a multi-modal, multi-channel search experience. This solution integrates Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cognitive Search, and Azure Language Understanding to help enterprises unleash knowledge accessibility, improving the knowledge quotient within organizations. This brings multiple AI-led capabilities like content summarization, knowledge graph-led data structuring, and a new kind of query interface.

It helps enterprises unleash new levels of productivity by optimizing business processes, empowering people, and creating high-quality customer and employee experiences. By facilitating faster information access and discovery, it helps enterprises improve employee productivity and satisfaction by creating more intelligent, personalized, and effective experiences. Users can also search for information from images, audios, videos, and other types of content in addition to documents.  Further, users get an omnichannel experience by being able to search across multiple channels, such as voice assistants or conversational AI platforms.

Fostering a Culture of Innovation: Leading by Example

At the heart of successful GenAI integration lies a culture of innovation. It begins with leadership buy-in, top-level management championing GenAI’s transformative potential, and providing the necessary resources and support. Leaders must set the tone, demonstrate a commitment to innovation, and encourage a mindset that embraces change and challenges the status quo.

Investing in training programs to upskill employees on AI technologies is equally crucial, ensuring the workforce has the knowledge and skills to leverage GenAI effectively. Moreover, encouraging experimentation and embracing failure as a learning opportunity can spark creativity and drive innovation at all levels of the organization. This culture of innovation is not just about technology; it’s about people and creating an environment where new ideas can flourish and translate into tangible business outcomes.

Developing a GenAI Adoption Playbook: A Roadmap to Success

For organizations embarking on their GenAI journey, a structured playbook can serve as a roadmap to success. By defining clear objectives, conducting pilot projects, measuring outcomes, and scaling up gradually, they can confidently navigate the transition from experimentation to full-scale implementation. This structured approach helps manage risks, allocate resources efficiently, and ensure that each step builds on the success of previous initiatives.

The goal is to embed AI into the organization’s DNA, ensuring that GenAI becomes an integral part of the company’s culture and operations. By embracing GenAI as a tool for innovation and growth, organizations can unlock their full potential and gain a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. This holistic integration involves technological changes and shifts in organizational structures, processes, and mindsets.

About the Author
sanjay manoharlal
Sanjay Manoharlal Choithani
Principal Consultant, Tech Mahindra

Sanjay holds Bacherlor’s in Electronics and Communications engineering with 20+ years of experience in IT services. With a passion for leveraging AI and Generative AI to revolutionize IT operations, he specializes in creating, developing, and positioning AIOps solutions for enterprises. He also drives the integration of GenAI capabilities into AI Ops engineering solutions, fostering strategic partnerships within the AI/GenAI ecosystem.

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Sanjay holds Bacherlor’s in Electronics and Communications engineering with 20+ years of experience in IT services. With a passion for leveraging AI and Generative AI to revolutionize IT operations, he specializes in creating, developing, and positioning AIOps solutions for enterprises. He also drives the integration of GenAI capabilities into AI Ops engineering solutions, fostering strategic partnerships within the AI/GenAI ecosystem.

Apart from leading the offerings development and roadmap, he also leads the GenAI use cases implementation and solutions for enterprise IT operations along with spearheading the "Quick Gen AI Prototyping" initiative, aiming to demonstrate GenAI value and tangible outcomes for customer’s quick use case requirements. He has a proven track record of leading high-performing teams of senior AIOps, IT Automation solution, and presales consultants, developers and implementation lead in AI/AIOps/Gen AI. His expertise in this area has been instrumental in winning multi-million-dollar RFPs through innovative solution selling in AI and GenAI space.

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