Fight, Flight or Freeze: What’s Your Response to the Threat of GenAI?

Midjourney: three abstract representations of flight, flight and freeze, digital, abstract, glitch pattern

Since the GenAI explosion at the beginning of last year, the digital industry has been grappling with the implications of such a significant technological disruption. This change presents both opportunities and threats to businesses large and small, and across most sectors.

Anand Rao, the global leader of artificial intelligence at PwC, articulates this threat well:

“With the eruption of AI, market leaders could soon be companies you’ve never heard of. In turn, big commercial names could struggle to sustain relevance or disappear altogether if their response has been too little or too late.”

When considering the threat, organizations typically respond in one of three ways: Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

Fight

Organisations in this category acted quickly and mobilised a GenAI task force dedicated to figuring out how best to apply this technology inside their organisation.

This response is being executed in a broad range of ways, from coordinated and value-focused to unwieldy and scattergun- and everything in between.

The organisations doing it well have followed a similar path, which can be summarised into the following high-level steps.

1. Aligning executive leadership
2. Creating a centralised function to focus on a GenAI
3. Starting with small, focused experiments to learn, gain traction and demonstrate value
4. Measuring and demonstrating the impact

Organisations which aren't doing it well typically have some or all of the following characteristics:

• Misaligned and/or disconnected executive leadership
• Adhoc experiments distributed across silos in the organisation
• No measure of success

Flight

I haven’t come across any organisation that is outright running away from GenAI, but I have seen pockets of ‘pushing it away’ for a few different reasons.

Some of these include:

• GenAI is seen as a distraction from achieving goals and objectives
• GenAI can’t add value to our product/service
• GenAI is creating fear in our workforce about losing their jobs
• GenAI is hype, and we’re not going to get sucked in
• GenAI is too risky to tackle now

This is not to say that these aren’t valid concerns, but if they quickly amount to walking away (or running away) from actively exploring GenAI’s potential, then they will likely be sabotaging their own future.

Freeze

Many organizations fall into this category. They want to realize the value of GenAI, but getting started is impossible because they are gridlocked. This gridlock can be caused by a multitude of reasons.

• Other transformation initiatives need to happen first (e.g., becoming Lean/Agile, product-led, data-led).
• Organizational silos and disconnected departments make coordination difficult.
• Legal teams have shut down GenAI adoption until further notice.
• Legacy technology needs to be replaced before new technologies can be implemented.

Fighting Right

With these response modalities in mind and the assumption that action is needed, what are the first three things organizations do to transition into action mode in a way that generates value for the organization?

Flight Companies

1. Executive Stakeholder Education: Ensure leadership understands the potential and risks of GenAI.
2. Executive Stakeholder Alignment: Align goals and strategies across the leadership team.
3. Setup Centralized GenAI Response: Create a dedicated team to oversee GenAI initiatives.

Frozen Companies

1. Executive Stakeholder Alignment: Get leaders on the same page regarding GenAI’s importance.
2. Centralize GenAI Response: Establish a central unit to drive GenAI efforts.
3. Start Small: Begin with pilot projects to demonstrate value and feasibility.

Fight Companies

1. Centralize GenAI Response: Coordinate efforts through a dedicated team.
2. Validated Use Cases: Focus on use cases with proven potential to add value.
3. Measure to Demonstrate Impact: Implement metrics to track and showcase the benefits of GenAI initiatives.

By understanding your current response to the GenAI transformation and tackling the first three things, organizations can transition into an effective action plan to harness GenAI’s transformative potential.