Sooner or later, businesses will need to adapt to the latest advancements in Generative AI. One such example is ChatGPT, the influential AI tool that made waves in the ecosystem at the end of 2022. Within three months, ChatGPT amassed over 100 million users and significantly impacted OpenAI's company valuation. Its popularity sparked a surge of competition, leading to the emergence of rivals like Google Bard (now Gemini), Microsoft Bing, and Baidu's Ernie Bot. Looking towards the limitless potential it offers, we've witnessed a growing trend of AI implementation in daily tasks, from drafting emails and generating insights to creating subtitles and more. Undoubtedly, this has led to significant workflow efficiency. However, the true potential of AI beyond automating mundane tasks is yet to be fully explored. In the context of open innovation and collaboration, companies may face challenges following such events. While open innovation aims to accelerate idea sourcing and gather valuable customer feedback simultaneously, ultimately translating into fresh, user-centric product development ideas, the competitive nature of business often leads to selecting only the "best of the best" for implementation. This raises the question: what happens to the remaining ideas? This is where generative AI can play a crucial role. According to Harvard Business Review, generative AI can play a pivotal role in two significant domains of innovation: democratizing innovation and augmenting human creativity. Companies struggle to organize these ideas due to four challenges: evaluation overload, the curse of expertise, the inability to translate ideas into coherent designs, and being too involved in details without looking at the bigger picture. Generative AI implementation in the innovation effort enhances human capabilities to create more comprehensive and impactful solutions. Accenture took an interesting approach to AI implementation. Using an AI companion provided by AWS, Accenture improves the developers' productivity by generating code recommendations. Quoting from the AWS case study page, the AI implementation has helped them to reduce 30% of development efforts, which allows them to focus on the team performance. While generative AI has taken the spotlight on technology advancement with its colors, that didn't make business players sure to go all in to invest in AI development. The key findings from the 2023 Asia Pacific AI Readiness Index released by Salesforce show that APAC's overall AI readiness has increased, both from government and business readiness. Meanwhile, many startups were still in doubt about focusing on AI due to its vague ROI path based on a poll conducted by Tech in Asia. The sizzling development of generative AI promises a future brimming with exciting advancements. There's no guarantee of success when it comes to investing in profound technology and innovation. However, with the proper strategy and clear path of vision, the earlier tapping into the tech trend, the better. Sources: - Harvard Business Review - Salesforce's 2023 Asia Pacific AI Readiness Index - Tech in Asia: How SEA’s startups are navigating genAI for business