ChatGPT Won’t Help Your Company

Generative-AI is very cool, but most organizations stand to gain limited benefits, at best.

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT, but until organizational culture changes, large companies won’t get much out of generative AI.

That’s already been proven.

Tools and techniques that have empowered companies to get several times more done with several factors less people have been around for years (think automation tools like Zapier, IFTTT, AirTable, WebMerge, and others across the entire value chain).

But for the most part, they’ve been used predominantly by startups and scale-ups, where necessity and resource constraints force different ways of work.

Most large organizations, for all of their expenditure on ‘digital transformation’, are still ruled by paralyzing bureaucracy, and are full of people who feel threatened by technology, prefer to manage by consensus than by conviction, and ultimately engage in games of ass-covering.

In the corporate world, it is still far too common to find:
1) one-hour meetings by default with way too many unnecessary people at the table (and a full day of back-to-backs, to boot)
2) meetings called to make inconsequential decisions and gain consensus for almost everything
3) constraining processes and policies (here’s looking at you procurement, communications, and legal)
4) things done manually in-house that could have been automated or outsourced for 1/10th the cost years ago
5) over-planning and over-discussing, and ultimately taking months to commit to a path of action, when running a quick experiment would have given us the feedback we needed to make a more informed and almost immediate decision

These are just SOME of the flawed ways that large companies go about their work.

In such organizations, the use of and benefit derived from generative-AI will be marginal, at best.

If organizations really want to change the way they do things and become an order of magnitude more efficient or better at what they do, they first need to address company culture and the policies that guide decision-making.

Then, and only then, can they start to truly reap the benefits of emerging technologies like ChatGPT and the broader suite of generative-AI tools.

Steve Glaveski is the founder of innovation accelerator Collective Campus, and author of Time Rich , host of the Future Squared podcast, and frequently contributes to Harvard Business Review. Find him on Twitter at @steveglaveski.