Technology & IT Services
Top 5 Lessons Learned from CDAOs Successfully Implementing GenAI
As reported by Gartner in 2023, out of the 70% of organizations exploring generative AI, only 19% had piloted or productionalized models. Although 68% of those executives believed that the benefits outweigh the risks, Gartner Group Chief of Research and Distinguished Analyst Frances Karamouzis cautioned, “Initial enthusiasm for a new technology can give way to more rigorous analysis of risks and implementation challenges. Organizations will likely encounter a host of trust, risk, security, privacy, and ethical questions as they start to develop and deploy generative AI.”
Most if not all of the CDAOs who successfully piloted or productionalized GenAI did encounter those questions, and eight have responded to the authors with interesting insights.
Without good data, there is no AI…
...said Heidi Lanford, former CDO of Fitch Group and Red Hat. “It’s pretty simple. You cannot have good AI without a solid data foundation.” Walgreens CDAO Vipin Gopal noted that “many organizations are rapidly trying to adopt GenAI but your data environment must be ready to enable value creation from AI.” An Oil and Gas CDO noted, “AI doesn’t make magic out of it. It’s only as good as the data you put into it.”
Conclusively, success favors organizations with maturity in data aggregation and democratization, data management, data governance, and above all, data quality. Data quality is essential because GenAI models create and make decisions. Poor data quality not only affects model output which engenders mistrust, but it also confounds the ability to understand how the output was derived.
GenAI is risky business
Lanford held a mirror to model mistrust to demonstrate its converse — the misuse of model output by decision-makers. “If you use natural language generation and you’ve never written anything, how can you critique or judge or approve a screenplay that AI generated? You’ve never written, you don’t understand what good writing looks like or how it’s done.”
Read the full article on CDO Magazine.