The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce has hosted an annual meeting of local business leaders since the 1800s, but the most recent meeting had a decidedly modern theme: artificial intelligence.
The goal was to demystify technology for the chamber’s approximately 2,000 members, particularly small businesses.
“My feeling is not that people are suspicious,” said Ralph Schulz, the chamber’s executive director. “They just don’t know exactly what its potential use is for them.”
When generative AI burst into public consciousness in late 2022, it captured the imagination of businesses and workers alike with its ability to answer questions, write paragraphs, write code, and create pictures. Analysts predicted that technology would transform the economy, leading to a productivity boom.
But so far the impact has been limited. Although AI adoption is on the rise, only about 5% of companies nationwide use the technology, according to one study. Census Bureau Business Survey. Many economists predict it will be years before generative AI has a measurable impact on economic activity, but they say changes will come.
“For me, this is a five-year story, not a five-quarter story,” said Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, global chief economist at Boston Consulting Group. “Over a five-year horizon, will I see something measurable? I think so.”
While some of the biggest companies, in Nashville and elsewhere, are finding uses for AI — and spending money and time developing more of it — many smaller companies are just beginning to dabble in the technology, or even to use it.
“The best and biggest are currently working to implement it and take advantage of it now, but the adoption curve is very early,” Carlsson-Szlezak said.
Allison Giddens, co-president of Win-Tech, an aerospace manufacturing company with 41 employees in Kennesaw, Ga., said she started using ChatGPT about six months ago for some operational tasks, like writing emails. to employees, analyze data and write basic documents. procedures for the company’s front office. A note stuck to his computer screen simply says “ChatGPT” to remind him to use the technology.
“We need to get into the habit of actually using the tool,” she said.
But she faces obstacles in implementing it on a larger scale and using it to make her business more efficient. Sometimes she finds ChatGPT’s responses irrelevant. Cybersecurity is important in its industry, so it needs to be careful about what information it feeds into AI models. And it hasn’t found a place for the technology in factories, where machinists make custom aluminum and titanium parts for the defense industry.
“There aren’t a lot of use cases for the shop floor yet,” she said.
Technological innovations, notably computing and the Internet, have always taken many years, even decades, to diffuse through the economy and affect productivity and production. The American economist Robert Solow said in 1987: “The computer age is visible everywhere, except in productivity statistics. »
Economists generally believe that the diffusion and adoption of generative AI will happen much more quickly, in part because information flows more quickly than in the past. The consulting firm EY-Parthenon, for example, concluded in a recent series on generative AI that technology could increase productivity within three to five years.
But there are significant barriers, including hesitancy to use the technology, legal and data security hurdles, regulatory friction, costs, and the need for more physical and technological infrastructure to support the AI, including computing power, data centers and software.
“We are still in the early stages of the revolution in that we have started to see significant investments to lay the foundations for this revolution,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “But we haven’t yet seen the full extent of the benefits from a productivity perspective, from a greater production perspective, from a greater deployment of labor perspective .”
David Duncan, chief executive of First Hospitality, a Chicago hotel management company, said the company is working to ensure its internal financial data can be used by AI systems in the future.
“We are planning the next generation of AI applications,” he said.
Mr. Duncan said he plans to use AI to analyze this data and create first drafts of reports, freeing up executives and chief executives. The company, which has about 3,600 employees, also hopes to leverage AI to analyze weekly surveys of workers over the course of a year to gather insights into trends in their teams’ overall morale.
“I believe we are in the early stages of a massive transformation in how we approach business ideas, strategy, data and results,” Duncan said.
According to surveys, AI use is greatest in information and professional services, which includes graphic design, accounting and legal services – traditionally white-collar jobs that have been less threatened by automation .
The study shows that marketing is among the most common uses of AI across all businesses. Gusto, a payroll and benefits platform for small businesses, find that of companies founded last year that used generative AI, 76% did so for marketing purposes.
Yet many economists believe that in the long term, few if any professions will not be affected in some way by AI. EY-Parthenon estimates that two-thirds of jobs in the United States – or more than 100 million jobs – have high or moderate exposure to generative AI, meaning these jobs could be changed by the technology. Other jobs, typically those that involve more social and human interaction, will likely be affected as well, through tasks such as administrative work.
And the diffusion of AI seems to be gaining momentum. A Center for Economic Studies working paper, using data from the Census Bureau’s Business Startup Statistics, found a “substantial and quiet rise” in applications for AI-related businesses last year, which could fuel the diffusion of the technology. The document also shows that companies born from AI-related applications over the years had greater potential than others in terms of job creation, payroll and revenue.
In summary, “we believe these AI startups have the potential to impact our economy in the near future,” said Can Dogan, associate professor of economics at Radford University in Virginia and one of the authors of the article. .
“In general, existing companies should find out what they can do with these technologies,” he added. “I think that’s the key to broader adoption.”
Chris Jones, founder of Planting Seeds Academic Solutions, an education and tutoring company with nine employees and 100 to 150 independent contractors, is among those trying to figure out how to use emerging AI technologies. Mr. Jones, based in Dallas, said he had been interested in using AI in his business in 2021 or 2022, but “never had the full attention needed to determine how AI could be integrated into our business”.
He hopes to soon hire a consultant to show the company how to use AI for sales, administrative tasks and program operations like program creation. He is aware of the potential impact on his employees’ jobs, he said, but he is aware of the changing economic landscape.
“As a business, I need to stay afloat because the competition is real,” Mr. Jones said.
In Nashville, Chamber President Bob Higgins is one of the driving forces pushing small and medium-sized businesses to adopt AI. He talked with other business leaders, hosted webinars and worked with a Vanderbilt University professor who is an expert in generative AI.
Mr Higgins also tries to lead by example. At Barge Design Solutions, an engineering and architectural services company where he is managing director, his human resources team used generative AI to help create job postings that generated more qualified candidates for positions that are difficult to fill. He also uses technology as a “thinking partner” to prepare for meetings and create agendas.
The ultimate goal, he said, is to “help make Nashville this GenAI city.”
“If you live in fear,” he said, “I think you’re going to be left behind.” »
