Is AI Changing Everything?

Nahel Gandhi, CEO and Founder of Parinamas  joined Twinning Strategy for our July 12th Episode to dive into the effects AI is having on new and old businesses. Nahel's take is that Generative AI is the Elephant in the room. Everyone is talking about it, many are starting to use it, and it is the source of a fair amount of business stress from the personal (wht does it mean for my job), to the corporate strategy (are we moving fast enough? investing in the right places), to the fear and anxiety over data security. On the one hand, GenAI is a tool that Nahel points out is democratizing technology. We no longer have to be coders and PhD data scientists to be AI experts and users. On the other hand, fear-mongering about the end of human creativity, loss of jobs, and the potential for data advantages to leak into the public are driving much of the conversation, with many high profile celebrities of the business world presenting their doom scenarios. Nahel emphasizes, that there is nothing like the creativity of the human mind. And like any tool from the "abacus" on forward, the negatives of a new tool affecting highly specialized jobs will be offset by the vast enhancements of productivity. The answer is not to avoid AI or throw unwarranted roadblocks in its way, but rather to adapt to the new reality that AI can take on many tasks that don't play to the strengths of the human brain. While this is not to say that there won't be a great deal of stress for some as they need to retool in this new world, but rather that society adapts and traditionally capitalizes on technology in positive ways.

On the data protection side, Nahel surfaces an intriguing direction of travel in industry:  moving the conversation beyond a single AI that answers your every question, but instead integrating the results derived from both private AI models with larger models driven by public data. In other words, your internal data informed AI becomes one of multiple AI experts that can weigh in to help you move the discussion forward. She sees the next generation of AI capabilities building on this conversation between AI models to allow even more customized responses. As an example, Nahel envisions the request for help in deciding what is for dinner, in a couple of years, not only to suggest the recipe, but integrate the knowledge of what ingredients are in your house, with your dietary needs, and your personal tastes to give you a customized answer that is better for you. Even further, the systems she sees on the horizon this decade can not just suggest, but take actions, e.g. book your travel, plan your itinerary. 

In the immediate term, AI can have immediate impact for anyone's day to day work. Reformulating e-mails, in Nahel's case to help her with the friendly intro and 'fluff' that she finds to be out of her wheelhouse, is a capability that everyone has easy access to through ChatGPT or Perplexity. Intriguingly, in different parts of the world, the trajectory is taking different directions. The East (e.g. China, India) are contending with extremely large populations, increasingly difficult to parse in traditional ways. The take for these societies is that the need is great to push forward in contrast to the West where the path is more measured against data privacy and introspection. Developing societies that have not had the years to pass through every phase of technology evolution (e.g. have jumped directly to mobile phones) are able to 'jump steps'.

In the end, Nahel left the conversation with the central message--AI is not something to be afraid of. The creativity of the human mind is going to always be a central force in the drive towards the future.