Generative AI: Market Primer

Cut through Gen AI buzzwords to achieve market clarity.

Analyst Perspective

The generative AI (Gen AI) marketspace is complex, nascent, and unstable.

Organizations need to get clear on what Gen AI is, its infrastructural components, and the governance required for successful platform selection.

The urge to be fast-moving to leverage the potential benefits of Gen AI is understandable. There are plenty of opportunities for Gen AI to enrich an organization’s use cases – from commercial to R&D to entertainment. However, there are requisites an organization needs to get right before Gen AI can be effectively applied. Part of this is ensuring data and AI governance is well established and mature within the organization. The other part is contextualizing Gen AI to know what components of this market the organization needs to invest in.

Owing to its popularity surge, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become near synonymous with Gen AI. However, Gen AI is an umbrella concept that encompasses a variety of infrastructural architecture. Organizations need to ask themselves probing questions if they are looking to work with OpenAI: Does ChatGPT rest on the right foundational model for us? Does ChatGPT offer the right modalities to support our organization’s use cases? How much fine-tuning and prompt engineering will we need to perform? Do we require investment in on-premises infrastructure to support significant data processing and high-volume events? And do we require FTEs to enable all this infrastructure?

Use this market primer to quickly get up to speed on the elements your organization might need to make the most of Gen AI.

Thomas Randall

Advisory Director, Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

“We are entering the era of generative AI.
This is a unique time in our history where the benefits of AI are easily accessible and becoming pervasive with co-pilots emerging in the major business tools we use today. The disruptive capabilities that can potentially drive dramatic benefits also introduces risks that need to be planned for.”

Bill Wong, Principal Research Director – Data and BI, Info-Tech Research Group

Who benefits from this project?

This research is designed for:

• Senior IT, developers, data staff, and project managers who:
  • Have received a mandate from their executives to begin researching the Gen AI market.
  • Need to quickly get up to speed on the state of the Gen AI market, given no deep prior knowledge of the space.
  • Require an overview of the different components to Gen AI to contextualize how vendor comparisons and selections can be made.
  • Want to gain an understanding of key trends, risks, and evaluative criteria to consider in their selection process.

This research will help you:

• Articulate the potential business value of Gen AI to your organization.
• Establish which high-value use cases could be enriched by Gen AI functionality.
• Assess vendor viability for enterprise and specialized software providers in the Gen AI marketspace.
• Collect information on the prerequisites for implementing Gen AI functionality.
• Develop relevant evaluative criteria to assist differentiating between shortlisted contenders.

This research will also assist:

• Executives, business analysts, and procurement teams who are stakeholders in:
  • Contextualizing the landscape for learning opportunities.
  • Gathering and documenting requirements.
  • Building deliverables for software selection projects.
  • Managing vendors, especially managing the relationships with incumbent enterprise software providers.

This research will help you:

• Identify examples of how Gen AI applications could be leveraged for your organization’s core use cases.
• Verify the extent of Gen AI functionality an incumbent enterprise provider has.
• Validate accuracy of Gen AI language and architecture referenced in project deliverables.

Insight Summary

You cannot speedrun Gen AI selection and implementation.

Organizations with (1) FTEs devoted to making Gen AI work (including developers and business intelligence analysts), (2) trustworthy and regularly updated data, and (3) AI governance are just now reaching PoC testing.

Gen AI is not a software category – it is an umbrella concept.

Gen AI platforms will be built on different foundational models, be trained in different ways, and provide varying modalities. Do not expect to compare Gen AI platforms to the same parameters in a vendor quadrant.

Bad data is the tip of the iceberg for Gen AI risks.

While Gen AI success will be heavily reliant on the quality of data it is fine-tuned on, there are independent risks organizations must prepare for: from Gen AI hallucinations and output reliability to infrastructure feasibility to handle high-volume events.

Gen AI use may require changes to sales incentives.

If you plan to use Gen AI in a commercial setting, review your sales team’s KPIs. They are rewarded for sales velocity; if they are the human-in-the-loop to check for hallucinations, you must change incentives to ensure quality management.

Prepare for ongoing instability in the Gen AI market.

If your organization is unsure about where to start with Gen AI, the secure route is to examine what your enterprise providers are offering. Use this as a learning platform to confidently navigate which specialized Gen AI provider will be viable for meeting your use cases.

Brace for a potential return of on-premises infrastructure to power Gen AI.

The market trend has been for organizations to move to cloud-based products. Yet, for Gen AI, effective data processing and fine-tuning may call for organizations to invest in on-premises infrastructure (such as more GPUs) to enable their Gen AI to function effectively.

Info-Tech’s methodology for understanding the Gen AI marketspace

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

The Gen AI market evaluation process should be broken into segments:

1. Gen AI market education with this primer
2. Structured approach to selection
3. Evaluation and final due diligence

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful"

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Software selection engagement

Five advisory calls over a five-week period to accelerate your selection process

• Receive expert analyst guidance over five weeks (on average) to select and negotiate software.
• Save money, align stakeholders, speed up the process, and make better decisions.
• Use a repeatable, formal methodology to improve your application selection process.
• Get better, faster results guaranteed, included in membership.

Click here to book your selection engagement.

Software selection workshops

40 hours of advisory assistance delivered online.

Select better software, faster.

• 40 hours of expert analyst guidance
• Project and stakeholder management assistance
• Save money, align stakeholders, speed up the process, and make better decisions
• Better, faster results guaranteed; 25K standard engagement fee

Click here to book your workshop engagement.