Generative AI in innovation and marketing processes: A roadmap of research opportunities Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have profoundly impacted the creative industries, ushering in an era of AI-generated content in literature, visual arts, and music. Trained on vast datasets of human-generated material, generative AI models such as large language models and diffusion models can now produce content with a sophistication that rivals—and may potentially displace—the works of human artists [28, 2, 13]. This burgeoning capability raises crucial questions about the legal and ethical boundaries of creative authorship, particularly concerning copyright infringement by generative models [30, 32]. Consequently, several AI companies are currently involved in lawsuits over allegations of producing content that potentially infringes on copyrights [32, 11].

Previous waves of automation technology mostly affected physical work activities, but gen AI is likely to have the biggest impact on knowledge work—especially activities involving decision making and collaboration. Professionals in fields such as education, law, technology, and the arts are likely to see parts of their jobs automated sooner than previously expected. This is because of generative AI’s ability to predict patterns in natural language and use it dynamically. Later, the focus shifted to machine learning systems, including “supervised learning” systems trained to make predictions based on large datasets of human-labeled examples. As computational power increased, deep learning algorithms became increasingly successful, leading to an explosion of interest in AI in the 2010s.

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Software engineers can use generative AI in pair programming and to do augmented coding and train LLMs to develop applications that generate code when given a natural-language prompt describing what that code should do. We estimate that generative AI could increase the productivity of the marketing function with a value between 5 and 15 percent of total marketing spending. Our updates examined use cases of generative AI—specifically, how generative AI techniques (primarily transformer-based neural networks) can be used to solve problems not well addressed by previous technologies. At present, training accounts for 80% of the energy usage and inference for about 20%, but, in the future, this is expected to flip on its head as the need for inference – passing new inputs through pre-trained models – accelerates. An often cited statistic, drawn from a paper by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI and the machine learning firm Hugging Face, is that generative AI systems can use up to 33 times more energy than machines running task-specific software. In the medium-to-long term, these concerns may have been alleviated by retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

Experiments demonstrate that our framework successfully identifies the most relevant data sources used in artwork generation, ensuring a fair and interpretable distribution of revenues among copyright owners. Our analysis finds that generative AI could have a significant impact on the pharmaceutical and medical-product industries—from 2.6 to 4.5 percent of annual revenues across the pharmaceutical and medical-product industries, or $60 billion to $110 billion annually. This big potential reflects the resource-intensive process of discovering new drug compounds.

They could also have an impact on knowledge workers whose activities were not expected to shift as a result of these technologies until later in the future (see sidebar “About the research”). For one thing, mathematical models trained on publicly available data without sufficient safeguards against plagiarism, copyright violations, and branding recognition risks infringing on intellectual property rights. A virtual try-on application may produce biased representations of certain demographics because of limited or biased training data.

There are many earlier instances of conversational chatbots, starting with the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology’s ELIZA in the mid-1960s. But most previous chatbots, including ELIZA, were entirely or largely

rule-based, so they lacked contextual understanding. In contrast, the generative AI models emerging now have no such predefined rules or

templates. Metaphorically speaking, they’re primitive, blank brains (neural networks) that are exposed to

the world via training on real-world data. They then independently develop intelligence—a representative

model of how that world works—that they use to generate novel content in response to prompts.

Ways You Can Take Advantage Of Generative AI’s Economic Potential

Specifically, this year, we updated our assessments of technology’s performance in cognitive, language, and social and emotional capabilities based on a survey of generative AI experts. Banks have started to grasp the potential of generative AI in their front lines and in their software activities. Early adopters are harnessing solutions such as ChatGPT as well as industry-specific solutions, primarily for software and knowledge applications. Generative AI could have a significant impact on the banking industry, generating value from increased productivity of 2.8 to 4.7 percent of the industry’s annual revenues, or an additional $200 billion to $340 billion.

Even if they don’t necessarily have to buy technological tools, they may need to train team members so they learn new skills. Some organizations have already utilized this process, offering 24/7 guidance and feedback to team members. Generative AI does skill-gap assessments and provides suggestions for learning courses and development ideas.

Interestingly, just under 20 per cent of respondents stated that they would allow complete data extraction as part of the audit. Today, analysts, creatives, and other professionals can leverage these powerful tools to streamline their workflows. Tools like ChatGPT have played a pivotal role in this shift, making AI accessible without the need for deep technical know-how. AI has permeated our lives incrementally, through everything from the tech powering our smartphones to autonomous-driving features on cars to the tools retailers use to surprise and delight consumers.

One surprising result is that baby boomers report using gen AI tools for work more than millennials. When we had 40 of McKinsey’s own developers test generative AI–based tools, we found impressive speed gains for many common developer tasks. Documenting code functionality for maintainability (which considers how easily code can be improved) can be completed https://chat.openai.com/ in half the time, writing new code in nearly half the time, and optimizing existing code (called code refactoring) in nearly two-thirds the time. Sales and the marketing industries are looking to benefit the most, thanks to the tech’s ability to streamline customer operations, while the manufacturing sector will cash in less from the AI gold rush.

Although GenAI is able to create new content, it sometimes produces content that, while semantically or syntactically plausible, is factually incorrect or nonsensical (i.e., hallucinations) (Huang & Rust, 2023). For instance, on February 6, 2023, Google announced its ChatGPT competitor named Bard with an image of Bard answering the question “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about? ” As several astronomers pointed out, one of the three replies that Bard provided was factually wrong.

Rather than succumbing to hype, organisations should identify practical use cases, establish necessary infrastructure and cultivate in-house expertise. Many firms are currently piloting AI projects, seeing potential benefits but hesitating on large-scale implementation due to reliability concerns. Billed as a once-in-a-generation technology, generative AI has aroused excitement and uncertainty in equal measures. For organisations, the million-dollar question is how GenAI can add value to stakeholders, from customers and employees to shareholders. Novartis uses a multi-cloud data analytics platform to optimize operations and accelerate innovation.

Compared to earlier forms of AI and analytics, such as machine learning and deep learning, generative AI could increase productivity by up to 40 percent. Adoption is also likely to be faster in developed countries, where wages are higher and thus the economic feasibility of adopting automation occurs earlier. Even if the potential for technology to automate a particular work activity is high, the costs required to do so have to be compared with the cost of human wages. In countries such as China, India, and Mexico, where wage rates are lower, automation adoption is modeled to arrive more slowly than in higher-wage countries (Exhibit 9).

First, they can draft code based on context via input code or natural language, helping developers code more quickly and with reduced friction while enabling automatic translations and no- and low-code tools. Second, such tools can automatically generate, prioritize, run, and review different code tests, accelerating testing and increasing coverage and effectiveness. Third, generative AI’s natural-language translation capabilities can optimize the integration and migration of legacy frameworks. A generative AI bot trained on proprietary knowledge such as policies, research, and customer interaction could provide always-on, deep technical support. Today, frontline spending is dedicated mostly to validating offers and interacting with clients, but giving frontline workers access to data as well could improve the customer experience. The technology could also monitor industries and clients and send alerts on semantic queries from public sources.

Generative AI (GAI) is the name given to a subset of AI machine learning technologies that have recently

developed the ability to rapidly create content in response to text prompts, which can range from short and

simple to very long and complex. Different generative AI tools can produce new audio, image, and video

content, but it is text-oriented conversational AI that has fired imaginations. In effect, people can

converse with, and learn from, text-trained generative AI models in pretty much the same way they do with

humans. So, along with its remarkable productivity prospects,

generative AI brings new potential business risks—such as inaccuracy, privacy violations, and intellectual

property exposure—as well as the capacity for large-scale economic and societal disruption. For example,

generative AI’s productivity benefits are unlikely to be realized without substantial worker retraining

efforts and, even so, will undoubtedly dislocate many from their current jobs. Consequently, government

policymakers around the world, and even some technology industry executives, are advocating for rapid

adoption of AI regulations.

While traditional manual labor positions may fall into obscurity or decrease significantly, other, more technical jobs will be created. However helpful and life-saving AI-powered machines may be, they can’t operate on their own. However, generative AI’s ability to replace some of the work done by human writers, artists, photographers, and other creative professionals was part of the reason for the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike that began in May 2023.

Generative AI technology is built on neural network software architectures that mimic the way the human

brain is believed to work. These neural nets are trained by inputting vast amounts of data in relatively

small samples and then asking the AI to make simple predictions, such as the next word in a sequence or the

correct order of a sequence of sentences. The neural net gets credit or blame for right and wrong answers,

so it learns from the process until it’s able to make good predictions. Ultimately, the technology draws on

its training data and its learning to respond in human-like ways to questions and other prompts.

This completely data-free approach is called zero-shot learning, because it requires no examples. To improve the odds the model will produce what you’re looking for, you can also provide one or more examples in what’s known as one- or few-shot learning. The ability to harness unlabeled data was the key innovation that unlocked the power of generative AI.

The effect of technological innovation on the economy is typically measured indirectly as economic output growth that cannot be accounted for by changes in capital or labor inputs used in the production process. It’s generally captured in TFP but is often measured as greater labor productivity growth. Previous generations of automation technology were particularly effective at automating data management tasks related to collecting and processing data. Generative AI’s natural-language capabilities increase the automation potential of these types of activities somewhat.

Early evidence of GenAI productivity effects

“The Macroeconomics of Artificial Intelligence,” Brynjolfsson E, Unger G. International Monetary Fund, December 2023. As with most large systems, there were occasional outages when the system unexpectedly became unavailable. Workers who had previously been using the system now had to answer questions without access to it, and nonetheless they continued to outperform those who had never used the system. In the 1980s, expert systems, which consisted of hundreds or thousands of “if…then” rules drawn from interviews with human experts, helped diagnose diseases and make loan recommendations, but with limited commercial success.

To keep pace with technological advancements, companies must foster a culture of innovation and continuous reinvention, constantly adapting their strategies and operations. Intelligent tech is accelerating drug recipe development from wet lab to in-silico methods. AI aids in quick regulatory approvals, enhances manufacturing coordination, and boosts supply chain resilience, ensuring compliance and market adaptability. While these applications sometimes make glaring mistakes (sometimes referred to as hallucinations), they are being used for many purposes, such as product design, urban architecture, and health care. The second step shifts north and east to Buffalo, NY, and a Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory research

psychologist named Frank Rosenblatt.

Looking across major economies, a GenAI-driven productivity upswing could also make a substantial contribution to the global economy. We estimate that the lift to global GDP from stronger productivity could total $1.2t to $2.4t over the next decade. Enabled by data and technology, our services and solutions provide trust through assurance and help clients transform, grow and operate.

• Nearly four in ten respondents reporting AI adoption expect more than 20 percent of their companies’ workforces will be reskilled, whereas 8 percent of respondents say the size of their workforces will decrease by more than 20 percent.
• Generative AI can help retailers with inventory management and customer service which are both cost concerns for store owners.
• And looking ahead, more than two-thirds expect their organizations to increase their AI investment over the next three years.
• Capitalizing on Galactica’s failure when it launched ChatGPT, OpenAI explicitly acknowledged that it could make mistakes.

A huge amount of data must be stored during training, and applications require significant processing power. This has resulted in larger companies, such as Google and Microsoft-supported Open AI, leading the way in application development. Generative AI systems are powerful because they are trained on extremely large datasets, which could potentially take advantage of nearly all the information on the internet.

Research and Development:

After consumers buy a firm’s offering, it is important to maintain their engagement beyond mere transactions (Pansari & Kumar, 2017). Customer engagement marketing represents “the firm’s deliberate effort to motivate, empower, and measure a customer’s voluntary contribution to its marketing functions, beyond a core, economic transaction” (Harmeling et al., 2017, p.312). Among various initiatives aimed at enhancing customer engagement (CE), a recent meta-analysis reveals that task-based initiatives are particularly effective (Blut et al., 2023). These initiatives “deliberately exist to push customers’ resource contributions” (Blut et al., 2023, p.497). Moreover, Harmeling et al. (2017) identify four key resources that consumers can voluntarily contribute to the firm’s marketing function, including creativity.

Gen AI’s precise impact will depend on a variety of factors, such as the mix and importance of different business functions, as well as the scale of an industry’s revenue. Nearly all industries will see the most significant gains from deployment of the technology in their marketing and sales functions. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. But high tech and banking will see even more impact via gen AI’s potential to accelerate software development. These tools have the potential to create enormous Chat GPT value for the global economy at a time when it is pondering the huge costs of adapting and mitigating climate change. At the same time, they also have the potential to be more destabilizing than previous generations of artificial intelligence. While other generative design techniques have already unlocked some of the potential to apply AI in R&D, their cost and data requirements, such as the use of “traditional” machine learning, can limit their application.

By comparison, other respondents cite strategy issues, such as setting a clearly defined AI vision that is linked with business value or finding sufficient resources. We further explored the SRS framework’s response to prompts requesting content generation from non-copyrighted data sources, as shown in Figure 4. In these scenarios, the SRS distribution was observed to be nearly uniform across all copyright owners. This outcome aligns with expectations, as the generated content lacks direct ties to any of the copyrighted data sources. This uniformity demonstrates the SRS framework’s ability to avoid disproportionate revenue distribution.

One European bank has leveraged generative AI to develop an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) virtual expert by synthesizing and extracting from long documents with unstructured information. The model answers complex questions based on a prompt, identifying the source of each answer and extracting information from pictures and tables. AI has permeated our lives incrementally, through everything from the tech powering our smartphones to autonomous-driving features on cars to the tools retailers use to surprise and delight consumers. Ai Group members enjoy access to the highest quality workplace relations, health & safety, and business advice, resources and support. They are represented by a powerful voice that influences the policy changes needed for Australian industry to thrive. One response to these concerns is to house AI models in green data centers, which have far lower emissions and often run on 100% renewable energy.

Numerous case studies and reports have pointed to AI’s impact on various industries, the economy, and the workforce. Gen AI has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing with its ability to leverage vast amounts of data and predict outcomes. To thrive in a world of generative AI, people will have to apply the technology across a range of situations and work tasks. In both India and the Philippines, there are important initiatives underway to improve digital literacy across the whole population. Generative AI is predicted to become a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, up from $40 billion in 2022, according to a recent report by Bloomberg Intelligence viewed by Insider.

A new report from McKinsey has put an estimate on these gains, predicting that generative technologies like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Google Bard, and DeepMind could add anywhere between $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the industry annually. While the use of AI has been simmering under the surface for decades, recent developments in generative AI have propelled the industry forward — opening up lucrative opportunities to countless businesses in its wake. Global economic growth was slower from 2012 to 2022 than in the two preceding decades.8Global economic prospects, World Bank, January 2023. Although the COVID-19 pandemic was a significant factor, long-term structural challenges—including declining birth rates and aging populations—are ongoing obstacles to growth.

In this section, we provide a technical overview of how GenAI models are trained and how they produce content. Given these technical specificities, we then explain why the output of GenAI can be helpful for firms, as it is both novel and appropriate–and, hence, creative (Amabile, 2018; Scopelliti et al., 2014). This is in the order of magnitude of the UK’s gross domestic product in 2021 of around $3.1 trillion. Compared to previous manifestations of artificial intelligence and analytics, such as machine learning and deep learning, this would represent an additional increase of 10 to 40 percent. The actual impact could be even higher if GenAI were integrated into software such as word processors or chatbots, allowing freed-up work time to be used for other tasks.

At the consumer level, the literature indicates that people’s ideas are influenced by those around them who are working on the same task (Mason & Watts, 2012; Stephen et al., 2016). Exposure to others’ ideas might lead consumers to engage in either cognitive fixation (Bayus, 2013) or cognitive stimulation (Luo & Toubia, 2015). Thus, we can expect consumers to either conform to a GenAI suggestion or further diversify in their efforts to reaffirm their diversity from machines. We theoretically expect that both conforming and diversifying consumers achieve higher levels of creativity when supported by GenAI, but through two different mechanisms. Leaders need to lead and learn in new ways to drive business performance and more productive, creative and meaningful work for everyone.

As a result, one of the primary concerns is that they may lose their jobs, leading to social unrest. While the economic potential of generative AI is valid, its implementation may prove challenging for many companies. Professionals with remarkable technical expertise must be recruited so they can operate the algorithm effectively. Therefore, many organizations that can’t afford such additions may be left behind and make massive efforts to catch up to their competition. Marketing and advertising can already see the economic potential and gains of generative AI as they can create content based on their target audience’s preferences.

This licence allows anyone to reproduce OLJ articles at no cost and without further permission as long as they attribute the author and the journal. With more and more companies turning to LLMs for a competitive edge, training should be seen as “an ongoing expense,’ he adds. In the rush to invest in generative AI, one thing that may be overlooked is the actual costs involved in implementing it. AI has certainly closed the technology divide the economic potential of generative ai and developers of AI pair programmers may argue that in the long term, anyone could be a programmer. But these claims also deserve scrutiny, particularly claims that AI could replace human developers. Ever since the public got its hands on generative AI, and at periodic intervals throughout the release cycles of all the big developers’ major announcements, it’s been clear that generative AI output has a huge trust barrier to overcome.

In Asia, there is a major opportunity for the business process outsourcing industry—so pivotal to many economies—to be an early mover in seizing potential efficiency gains. A third major area of economic impact involves enhancing workplace efficiency through generative AI’s ability to digest and summarize vast amount of information. The technology helps to make big data more interpretable and useful for decision-making, especially in industries that rely on large amounts of data or involve complex tasks, such as financial services, professional services, scientific research, and ICT. But equally, generative AI tools offer productivity benefits for workers in administrative fields—lessening their workloads and enabling them to refocus on higher-level or more interpersonally challenging work.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Generative AI

If you’re interested in finding out how AI-proof your job is, we spoke to experts and compiled a list of the roles most likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence. As apps like ChatGPT and Copilot continue to transform the way business is conducted, generative AI could contribute up to $4.4 trillion to this total, with estimates doubling when you account for AI-assisted workplace tools like Dynamics 365 AI. Interestingly, the range of times between the early and late scenarios has compressed compared with the expert assessments in 2017, reflecting a greater confidence that higher levels of technological capabilities will arrive by certain time periods (Exhibit 7).

AI algorithms learn from the data they’re trained on, and the algorithms can perpetuate those biases in their outputs if that data is biased or incomplete. The World Economic Forum anticipates a shortfall of 10 million healthcare workers by 2030. Gen AI is expected to help address this shortage through increased efficiency, allowing fewer workers to serve more patients. While generative AI brings opportunities for all Asian economies, the transition also has to be carefully managed.

The model combines search and content creation so wealth managers can find and tailor information for any client at any moment. Generative AI has taken hold rapidly in marketing and sales functions, in which text-based communications and personalization at scale are driving forces. The technology can create personalized messages tailored to individual customer interests, preferences, and behaviors, as well as do tasks such as producing first drafts of brand advertising, headlines, slogans, social media posts, and product descriptions. In other cases, generative AI can drive value by working in partnership with workers, augmenting their work in ways that accelerate their productivity. Its ability to rapidly digest mountains of data and draw conclusions from it enables the technology to offer insights and options that can dramatically enhance knowledge work. This can significantly speed up the process of developing a product and allow employees to devote more time to higher-impact tasks.

This is an aging network that is ill suited to respond to such sudden increases in demand. Great innovations often start out at a high cost, but as they reach a large market the costs to produce go down, so the price falls, enabling wider adoption. With generative AI use expected to grow rapidly this decade, there’s no time like the present to get these conversations going and processes put in place. Read the full report to discover potential use cases and opportunities, as well as what to consider if you’re thinking of using generative AI applications in your organization.

What’s more, the number of companies planning to increase investment in generative AI stands at 63%, a third down on the 93% recorded in 2023. Another limitation of zero- and few-shot prompting for enterprises is the difficulty of incorporating proprietary data, often a key asset. If the generative model is large, fine-tuning it on enterprise data can become prohibitively expensive. They allow you to adapt the model without having to adjust its billions to trillions of parameters. They work by distilling the user’s data and target task into a small number of parameters that are inserted into a frozen large model.

At the firm level, understanding the psychological mechanisms that link objective LLM parameters to persuasiveness, can help firms tailor messages to increase their customer base’s purchase intention by defining message parameters ex-ante. It is hence important to account for such heterogeneity of marketing performance metrics when assessing GenAI’s capacity to craft persuasive messages. In sum, the stochastic nature of foundation models enables them to generate novel content. The extensiveness of the data they have been trained on allows this novelty to also be appropriate. Given how foundation models choose the next word, note, or image feature, such content however is random and different at each iteration, making it possible to produce several, unique responses from the same prompt. This inherent randomness explains why it is hard to detect content generated by GenAI (Else, 2023).

While the use of gen AI tools is spreading rapidly, the survey data doesn’t show that these newer tools are propelling organizations’ overall AI adoption. The share of organizations that have adopted AI overall remains steady, at least for the moment, with 55 percent of respondents reporting that their organizations have adopted AI. Less than a third of respondents continue to say that their organizations have adopted AI in more than one business function, suggesting that AI use remains limited in scope. Product and service development and service operations continue to be the two business functions in which respondents most often report AI adoption, as was true in the previous four surveys. And overall, just 23 percent of respondents say at least 5 percent of their organizations’ EBIT last year was attributable to their use of AI—essentially flat with the previous survey—suggesting there is much more room to capture value. Although intuitive for evaluating the impact of individual data sources, the LOO score has limitations.