Portal26’s Neil Cohen on the State of Generative AI 2023 Survey

I spoke with Neil Cohen, Head of Go-To-Market Strategy for Portal26, about a new survey that details how businesses are using generative AI. The survey results reveal major investment in AI – and also major concerns.

See below for a podcast and video version of the interview.

Some key quotes from the interview:

Survey Results: AI Hopes and Challenges

“There are findings [from the survey] that validate what a lot of people are thinking, but I think there were a couple of surprises. I think when people talk about generative AI, they talk about the hopes and fears.

“So, you have 80 plus percent of the companies saying, ‘This is the greatest thing.’ And then you have the same number of people saying data security and other issues are a downside. So how do you balance those things?

“I think the next biggest stat was that, when we looked across all industries – 12 different industries – 73% of them in the last year or so had a misuse incident with generative AI. So those are the ones that are admitting it, right? Seventy-three percent. When you look at some verticals, like the legal profession, a hundred percent of them had a problem.”

The AI Learning Curve

“When you’re in ChatGPT or some other AI app, that prompt box looks like a search box. So if you treat it like search, you’re going to get a different kind of response than if you treat it like a prompt. Search is a hundred percent about intent; generative AI is about creation. That’s a different kind of thing. So what you’re going to ask it, how [you’re] going to talk to it, or have it help you do, is very different. And so that’s a big part of the challenge of people trying to adapt to this new technology.”

Problems with Shadow AI

“You’ve got a lot of [people] using ‘shadow AI,’ where you have people going, “I don’t care if my company banned it – I’m going to [use it anyway]. I’m going to do the work, I’m going to come back, I’m going to put it back in the system.”

“So you’ve got a lot of people who are working with a productivity [tool] that many people still don’t understand. More and more AI apps are public models – when you feed data into them, it becomes public.” 

AI and Job Creation  

“[Technology shifts] created new jobs and continue to create new jobs, and I think AI will create new jobs like you just mentioned earlier: prompt engineer. [Creating] strategic uses for artificial intelligence, applied AI – how are you going to apply it? What are the right uses? How do you manage it with an organization?

“There are going to be lots of developments that are going to come out – we don’t even know what the new jobs are yet. Prompt engineer didn’t exist two or three years ago. It does now. What else new is going to exist?”

Podcast and Video

Also available on Apple Podcasts