MARYLAND HEIGHTS — The half-billion-dollar idea started just over a year ago, during the 2022 holiday break.
OpenAI had just released ChatGPT, and it was clear that artificial intelligence technology had just taken a historic leap forward. Workers at IT and tech companies began experimenting with the program over the holidays, and when they returned to the office, it seemed like every one of them was talking about ChatGPT, recalled Tim Denny, vice president of World Wide Technology’s Advanced Technology Center in Maryland Heights.
Aaron Freidenberg, the center’s director, queried ChatGPT for stats on ºüÀêÊÓƵ Cardinals legend Albert Pujols.
“It could quickly spit out the answer,†he said. “It was just so quick.â€
The program was easy to use and available to all for experimentation — not just the experts. It captured the imaginations of just about everyone in the tech world, and generative AI began to appear high on the priority lists among World Wide’s customers — which are primarily large, Fortune 1000 companies.
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“Everyone was kind of playing around with it on their own. And I think that’s really when minds started to open up to, ‘OK, the future is different,’†Denny said.
Over the following year, companies across the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region, across industries, considered how generative AI — which can create new data, images and text based on what it learns — might make their businesses more efficient, or lend a competitive edge.
Leaders are considering the benefits, and the risks, the tech will afford them.
In December, World Wide Technology announced plans to invest $500 million over the next three years to drive AI adoption among its clients.
Farms, hospitals, manufacturers
From tech companies like World Wide Technology to hospitals, manufacturers, investment firms and agricultural suppliers, all have begun to imagine ways to save employees time on menial tasks, and put more information at workers’ and customers’ fingertips.
Emerson, the Ferguson-based factory automation giant with customers and employees in most of the world’s countries, hopes to use generative AI for translation, said Clint Schneider, Emerson’s director of digital services, cloud and AI. The company might have an employee in California who is an expert in a specific brand of control valves — expertise that only a dozen or so people in the world might have — and serves customers in the U.S., but also in South Korea.
And for newly hired salespeople, Schneider said, generative AI could answer questions to help them better understand a product line — and more intelligently than any search engine could.
Meanwhile, experts at Bayer’s Crop Science Division began working on a prototype generative AI program for farmers.
Bayer already makes recommendations to farmers, on decisions like when to plant, irrigate, harvest, apply fertilizer, and what density to plant the seed in the field — all tailored to the farm, the environmental conditions, and the weather. But AI can make it easier to understand that sort of data, and ask questions of it, said Nitin Nahata, senior engineering director at Bayer’s digital farming arm, Climate.
“Now a human can easily ask very intuitive questions. Things like, ‘How did a certain variable affect my yield last year?’ Just through a chatbot type of interface,†Nahata said. “’Hey, show me fields which are lacking in irrigation,’ for example, or, ‘Show me fields where it rained last night.’ ... ‘Show me the impact of planting date on my wheat crop yield.’â€
Bayer is testing the prototype, which is still in the early stages, Nahata said.
Nalini Polavarapu, vice president of enterprise analytics and data science at Bayer, also sees potential to use AI to help crop scientists, who need to be able to answer a wide range of questions from growers.
“The range of topics is huge,†Polavarapu said. “No any one person is proficient.â€
In the past, if there was an issue the company wanted to tackle, the solution might come from five Bayer leaders sitting in a room, she said. Now, customers and business groups are hearing about ChatGPT, envisioning ways to use such technology, and approaching the company with potential uses.
“The opportunities have opened up to large groups of people with domain knowledge — and has really democratized the usage of AI,†Polavarapu said.
The AI ‘gold rush’
Freidenberg, of World Wide Technology, said one thing is certain: Executives have to start looking at how generative AI will affect their businesses. Because their employees are likely already using it.
There are legal and ethical issues to wade through, from how it uses intellectual property to the risk of creating bad data, sometimes referred to as AI “hallucinations.â€
“Done right, it can be a huge benefit. Done wrong, it can be a huge liability or risk,†said Chad Bockert, vice president of marketing for World Wide Technology.
At Emerson, leaders told employees early on that ChatGPT learns through human feedback, so any information they entered into it could be used to train the model. To protect Emerson’s intellectual property, the company asked its workers not to use the program for business purposes, said Schneider, the digital services director.
“We take a zero-trust approach to our AI and generative AI tools,†Schneider said.
The company established a governance team over AI use, which includes Schneider and members of Emerson’s IT, legal and cybersecurity units, and discusses the potential uses of the technology — and the possible unintended consequences.
Other companies are being similarly cautious.
The Chesterfield-based Mercy hospital system began exploring potential uses for AI across its health system last year, and in December released a chatbot to answer patients’ questions online. Last year, an executive said Mercy was developing an internal AI “code of conduct.â€
World Wide Technology staffers said they provide instructional videos, articles and quizzes for employees who are new to the technology — a process they refer to as an “AI driver’s license.â€
But with those safeguards in place, companies are beginning to imagine how generative AI will change the way they do business.
Companies are investing now, on the belief that in the not-so-distant future, AI will prove an important tool for efficiency and decision making. They imagine AI saving workers time on menial tasks, or tapping into troves of data that are created during the normal course of business, but are too large or disorganized to investigate with human hours.
“We see it as a huge opportunity,†said Bockert, the World Wide marketing executive. “We’re making investments to make sure that we’re at the forefront of being able to help large organizations. ... Because it is a little bit of a Gold Rush.â€
“It’s really kind of what people’s imagination can lead them to,†Bockert continued. “It can shave off a lot of very manual, lengthy steps. ... Hours to minutes.â€
Of course, changes won’t happen overnight.
Kirk McDonald, a portfolio manager and senior research analyst at a boutique investment firm in Clayton, began experimenting with AI-based tools around 2017.
Analyzing CEO-speak
His firm, Argent Capital Management, began with a program that analyzed what public companies’ executives said during quarterly conference calls with investors. It offered an overall score, suggesting whether the call was positive or negative in tone, and then individual scores for different sections of the call.
Was the CEO’s tone positive or negative? What about the chief financial officer? During the question-and-answer portion, were the queries from financial analysts positive or negative in tone? A phrase like “revenue growth struggled in the quarter,†for instance, would be a clear red flag. Argent incorporated the software into its stock performance prediction model, but gave it a very small weight, McDonald said.
Then, after a year or so, he found that it was no longer adding much value.
“We didn’t really know why,†McDonald said. “We couldn’t identify any problem.â€
He wasn’t sure whether the technology had evolved because of changes at the company that made it. Or perhaps, he wondered, his firm just had a more long-term view on investments than the software did. Regardless, Argent stopped using it.
The firm tried another program, which also analyzed earnings calls. It was impressive in some ways, but similarly, they found it didn’t add much value.
“We were using it during a time when interest rates were going up, and it didn’t really matter what was said on the call,†recalled senior research analyst Bill Weeks.
They tried a third software, which provided the analysts with summaries of the earnings calls. But they found, McDonald said, that it did not catch the important parts.
“It wasn’t yet trustworthy,†he said.
In the coming years, he’s certain it will change the way investment analysts do their jobs — and make them better at it. Better tools for analyzing earnings calls would be significant, if they work well enough that investors can trust them. And a program that can summarize those calls, and get to the important pieces, would be a huge time-saver.
“We’re just going to keep trying, until we figure out the ways to use it,†McDonald said.
Still, neither McDonald nor Weeks believe that AI-based tools can replace human work.
“Human judgment is very important,†Weeks said. “At the end of the day, we still have to know what these companies are doing.â€