AI in business is moving fast. In this session, Gerry Lawrence explores where artificial intelligence comes from, where it’s headed, and how mid-market CEOs can use AI in business to drive growth, improve efficiency, and unlock new value. Gain valuable insights into how AI is accelerating growth, enhancing efficiency, and creating unprecedented opportunities for mid-market businesses like yours. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how AI can revolutionise your organisation and drive success in today’s competitive market.
Highlights
Why AI is booming right now (00:15)
Although AI concepts have been around since World War II with Alan Turing, the sudden boom “why now” is due to massive financial investments and dumping huge amounts of cash to make models bigger and access vast training datasets. This has caused rapid improvements in a single year, particularly in text and image generation, making it difficult to differentiate between AI-generated and real images.
The standard vs. custom approach “fork in the road” (01:46)
CEOs face a fork in the road between a standard and custom approach. The standard path involves utilizing built-in AI functionality from established vendors like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Adobe. For this path, the CEO’s role is to build enthusiasm and guide teams on using these tools. Alternatively, the custom approach targets highly specific business problems where the financial rewards can be much bigger. This custom route has become much more affordable due to cloud services from Microsoft and Amazon AWS.
Maturity of different AI tools (05:25)
The speaker highlights that from an “outside-in” perspective, tools for generating and understanding text and images are already highly mature and ready for business use. Video and sound technologies are catching up very quickly with visible improvements every week. Additionally, complex systems like advanced corporate knowledge bases and personalized recommendation engines (similar to those used by Netflix or Amazon) have now become affordable and accessible even for smaller mid-market companies.
Where to start and finding the value overlap (06:31)
When deciding where to start, CEOs should look inward at their largest departments or highest-cost areas—such as customer service, sales, and marketing—where automation can generate immediate value. To find the ultimate sweet spot, leadership must look for the collision point where their internal business challenges directly overlap with mature, readily usable AI tools like text, image, or recommendation systems.