The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce has convened an annual meeting of local business leaders since the 19th century, but the most recent meeting had a decidedly modern theme: artificial intelligence.
The goal was to demystify technology for the chamber's roughly 2,000 members, especially small businesses.
“My feeling is not that people are cautious,” said Ralph Schulz, the chamber's executive director. “They're just not clear about its potential use for them.”
When generative ai burst into public consciousness in late 2022, it captured the imagination of businesses and workers with its ability to answer questions, compose paragraphs, write code, and create images. Analysts projected that technology would transform the economy by fueling a productivity boom.
However, so far, the impact has been limited. Although ai adoption is increasing, only about 5 percent of companies nationwide are using the technology, according to a Census Bureau business survey. Many economists predict that generative ai is years away from measurably affecting economic activity, but they say change will come.
“To 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 anything measurable? I think so.”
While some of the largest companies, in Nashville and elsewhere, are finding uses for ai (and spending money and time developing more), many smaller companies are just beginning to dabble in the technology, if they use it at all. .
“The biggest and best are working to implement it and get value from 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, Georgia, said she started using ChatGPT about six months ago for some operational tasks, such as writing emails to employees, analyzing data and writing drafts. basics. Procedures for the company's front office. A note taped to her computer monitor simply says “ChatGPT” to remind her to use the technology.
“We have to get used to using the tool,” he said.
But you face obstacles to implementing it more broadly and using it to make your business more efficient. Sometimes you find ChatGPT responses to be off base. Cybersecurity is important in your industry, so you need to be careful about the information you feed into ai models. And it hasn't found a place for the technology in the factory, where machinists make custom aluminum and titanium parts for the defense industry.
“There aren't many use cases for the workshop yet,” he said.
Historically, technological innovations, including computing and the Internet, have taken many years or decades to diffuse through the economy and affect productivity and output. American economist Robert Solow said in 1987: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
Economists generally believe that the spread and adoption of generative ai will happen much faster, in part because information flows more quickly than in the past. The consulting firm EY-Parthenon, for example, concluded in a ai/power-of-gen-ai” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>recent series on generative ai that the technology could increase productivity in three to five years.
But there are some significant barriers, including concerns about using the technology, legal and data security obstacles, regulatory frictions, costs, and the need for more physical and technological infrastructure to support ai, including computing power, data and software.
“We are still in the early stages of the revolution in the sense that we have begun to see significant investment in laying the foundations of that revolution,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “But we haven't seen the full extent of the benefits yet from a productivity standpoint, from a higher production standpoint, from a higher labor utilization standpoint.”
David Duncan, CEO of First Hospitality, a hotel management company in Chicago, said the company was working to ensure its internal financial data could be used by artificial intelligence systems in the future.
“We are planning the next generation of ai applications,” he said.
Duncan said he envisioned using ai to analyze this data and create initial drafts of reports, freeing up executives and general managers. The company, with about 3,600 employees, also hopes to leverage ai to analyze weekly surveys of workers over the course of a year to gain insight into trends in the overall morale of its teams.
“I believe we are in the early stages of a massive transformation of the way we process business ideas, strategies, data and results,” Mr. Duncan said.
According to surveys, ai use is highest in professional and information services, including graphic design, accounting and legal services, traditionally white-collar jobs that have been less threatened by automation.
Research shows that marketing is among the most common uses of ai across businesses. Gusto, a benefits and payroll platform for small businesses, found that among companies created last year that used generative ai, 76 percent did so for marketing.
Still, many economists think that, in the long term, few, if any, occupations will not be affected in some way by ai. EY-Parthenon estimated that two-thirds of American employment (more than 100 million jobs) are highly or moderately exposed to generative ai, meaning those jobs could be disrupted by the technology. The rest, typically jobs with more social and human interaction, are likely to be affected as well, through tasks such as administrative work.
And the spread of ai appears to be gaining steam. TO working document of the Center for Economic Studies, using data from the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics, found a “substantial, discrete jump” last year in ai-related business applications, which could boost the technology's spread. The paper also showed that companies that emerged over the years from ai-related applications had greater potential than others in terms of job creation, payrolls and revenue.
Taken together, “we think there is potential for these ai startups to have an impact on our economy in the near future,” said Can Dogan, an associate professor of economics at Radford University in Virginia and one of the paper's authors. .
“Overall, existing companies should figure 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 between 100 and 150 independent contractors, is among those trying to figure out how to use emerging artificial intelligence technologies. Dallas-based Jones said he was interested in using ai in his company in 2021 or 2022, but “never had the full attention to determine how ai could be incorporated 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 such as curriculum creation. He is aware of the potential effect on his employees' jobs, he said, but is clear-eyed about the changing economic landscape.
“As a company, I need to stay afloat, because the competition is real,” Jones said.
In Nashville, a driving force pushing small and medium-sized businesses to adopt ai is chamber president Bob Higgins. He has been talking to other business leaders, holding webinars and working with a Vanderbilt University professor who is an expert in generative ai.
Higgins is also trying to lead by example. At Barge Design Solutions, an engineering and architectural services firm where he is CEO, his human resources team has used generative ai to help create job postings that generated more qualified candidates for hard-to-fill positions. He also uses technology as a “thought partner” to prepare for meetings and create agendas.
The ultimate goal, he said, is “to help make Nashville a GenAI city.”
“If you live in fear,” he said, “I think you will be left out.”
