London, October 23, 2024

Arthur D. Little (ADL)’s Blue Shift today published Generative Artificial Intelligence: Towards a New Civilization? a major new report on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (GenAI). It demonstrates that current GenAI tools, such as ChatGPT, are just the small tip of a gigantic AI iceberg, and that this AI iceberg will heavily impact every sector. However, many executives have yet to fully grasp this revolution for business, society, and humans.

Based on extensive analysis and research with 150 international experts, the report shows that Generative AI models now consistently meet or surpass median human performance in a broadening spectrum of tasks, including language understanding, inference, and text summarization.

The report also demonstrates that applications will stretch far beyond chatbots and text generation — their most popular current forms. In fact, most corporate intellectual tasks currently done by humans are, or will be, impacted. As a result, GenAI will profoundly affect most industries, starting with obvious/standalone use cases, such as marketing content generation and customer support, progressing toward more sophisticated ones, such as financial decision-making, before finally moving to the most integrated such as industrial process automation. However, despite the scale of the transformation and the expected benefits, only around 50% of organizations have thus far made investments or hiring decisions that pursue GenAI, signaling a surprising degree of unreadiness.

The report also covers critical uncertainties around GenAI and AI, i.e., the factors that are potentially very impactful and yet also very uncertain. These critical uncertainties may eventually lead to very different futures. While regulatory shifts are the most pressing uncertainty, the quality and scalability of Generative AI and its possible progression towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – an AI that would surpass humans on a broad spectrum of tasks - are central unknowns. AGI’s potential is game-changing, although its trajectory remains unpredictable. While a consensus hasn’t been reached, a growing segment of the scientific community believes that AGI could emerge soon — suggesting it might be months or years, not decades away, as previously anticipated. The emergence of AGI, if and when it occurs, would indeed be a radical change to civilization.

Dr. Albert Meige, Global Director of Blue Shift at Arthur D. Little, comments: “By now everyone has tried generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, but few have truly understood the disruptive power that GenAI delivers and the impact it has and will have. That’s why we chose Towards a New Civilization? as the title for our report. We wanted to emphasize two of our key conclusions – tools such as ChatGPT make up just a small part of what GenAI can do, and that the possibilities it brings are truly transformational for us all.”

Generative Artificial Intelligence: Towards A New Civilization?, can be viewed and downloaded here.