I wanted to hear directly from practitioners because it seems to me that, as with the previous era-defining event — the COVID-19 pandemic — and its impact on the workplace, imagining what is ahead with this new technology is a tough call. As with the emergence of hybrid work and work-from-home initiatives in response to the pandemic, figuring out the right approaches to generative AI is a process replete with ambiguity, experiments, and changes of mind. In other words, it is a learning process driven both by the initiative of individuals and the strategies of organizations.

Like the response to the pandemic, debate and action around gen AI are moving fast.

Two facts are emerging. First, this is a rapidly developing technology. The size of the investment gives a sense of this. So, too, does the volume of experimentation: One executive told me, “We have created a head of generative AI with a role simply to moderate and make sense of the hundreds of experiments we have running on any day.�