News Analysis
Ever since the GenAI bandwagon started rolling in 2022, solution providers have been pushing the same narrative: generative AI drives efficiency, productivity and frees up employees to spend less time on grunt work and more time on strategic matters.
Faster processing and intelligent parsing have also been key components of the messaging, although vendors usually lean away from providing too much detail. That makes sense from a marketing perspective. Improved data processing will never sound sexy, especially to an audience made up mainly of business leaders, not technology executives.
However, it's easy to imagine how more sophisticated technology might impact a business. Countless companies have attempted to link their products to AI as a result. Phrases like “powered by AI” are plastered on pretty much everything nowadays, from royalty-free image libraries to time clocks (no, really, time clocks).
Credit where credit is due, though. Marketers were asked to generate excitement about largely untested products to an audience that was more focused on getting work done than exploring solutions with unclear payoffs. First, they talked about advanced automation saving person-hours and increasing productivity. Their pitches haven’t changed much since then, although they have adopted language around workforce management and performance rather than technical advancement.
GenAI Enters the Agent Age
The talk today among vendors centers around “agents” and how to integrate them into the workforce. Agents are tools designed to augment the work of human employees, strengthening efforts to scale, analyze data, qualify sales leads or answer customer service questions. Vendors position these agents as part of the team, rather than as technology solutions. They pursue their jobs unattended until a problem requires human intervention. Then, they hand things off to a live person, along with a summary of their interactions, an overview of the parties involved, and recommendations on what to do next.
In other words, vendors are starting to understand that businesses are looking for the value AI creates, rather than selling it on its own merits.
Case in point, in mid-September, Workday announced Illuminate, the next generation of its AI platform.
Illuminate’s models draw from the more than 800 billion business transactions processed by Workday each year. Workday stated the platform understands not only the data it receives but also the context, the "why" or "how," behind every HR and financial process. It understands how processes are connected, the people and roles involved, and current tasks, all managed through Workday’s conversational AI interface.
Around the same time, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents that aim to drive efficiency by extending the work of employees. Salesforce stated the product allows companies to scale their workforce as needed to help analyze data, improve decision making and address straightforward tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads and optimizing marketing campaigns.
Agentforce aims to outperform “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” by operating autonomously, retrieving necessary data, building action plans and executing on them without human intervention. Salesforce compares its approach to self-driving cars: Operating independently, these agents use real-time data to adapt to changing conditions as they do work.
Related Article: Generative AI, the Great Productivity Booster
Slack Reimagined 'Work Operating System'
Capabilities like these change the way tech vendors look at the needs of the market. Slack CEO Denise Dresser told TechCrunch the business chat platform is morphing into a “work operating system” by becoming a central point for AI applications. “Dresser sees Slack as more than a place to chat with coworkers,” the author, Maxwell Zeff wrote. “The question is do users want that, and if they do, will they pay a premium for the capability?”
Slack is betting they will. Last week, the company announced new features to be offered through a new, pricier tier: Slack AI. The features include AI-generated Huddle summaries, similar to the channel summaries already available to some subscribers. Users can also chat with Salesforce's AI agents in the platform, alongside tools from third parties that enable AI web search and AI image generation.
Of note is these announcements drowned out OpenAI’s news about a new product, OpenAI o1, its latest model that bases answers on logic rather than predicted word usage.
“With previous models like ChatGPT, you ask them a question and they immediately start responding,” Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, told the New York Times. "This model can take its time. It can think through the problem — in English — and try to break it down and look for angles in an effort to provide the best answer."
Large language models possess advanced linguistic and logical abilities, but often struggle with simple problems, such as basic math. With OpenAI o1, users apply positive and negative feedback to its answers to improve its performance. Among other things, the approach is an important component in turning an LLM into a useful chatbot, said OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.
OpenAI’s not alone in the quest to develop LLMs that can attack complex tasks. Google, Meta and other tech firms are creating similar technologies, while Microsoft is incorporating OpenAI’s new system into its products.
The new models are another step toward OpenAI’s goal of offering more human-like AI, notes the Verge. “More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models,” wrote the author, Kylie Robison. “But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a ‘preview’ to emphasize how nascent it is.”
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The GenAI Picture Starts to Come Into Focus
Whether you view these changes as tweaks or important steps forward, the Salesforces and Workdays of the world have positioned AI as a business solution by providing clarity on how their tools fit into a business. An electronic team member that can address specific tasks is much stronger positioning than a simple “AI Inside.” Watching how companies like Salesforce and Workday proceed will teach the industry a lot about turning AI from a promise into the foundation of real business solutions.
