With generative artificial intelligence emerging as the new way of doing business, successfully riding the gen AI wave is top of mind for companies.

As a result, how to apply gen AI has become an important topic for an organization’s modernization journey. The conversation is shifting from productivity to growth, given that enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement remains a vital objective, according to Rodney Zemmel (pictured), global leader of McKinsey Digital at McKinsey & Company.

“The amazing thing about gen AI is it’s the world’s easiest technology to pilot, but it’s quite hard to get enterprise value at scale from it,” he said. “Everyone wants to do something cool, wants to show it off externally, but you’re seeing impact everywhere except in the actual P&L. We talk about the four Cs of where we’re seeing gen AI being applied. It’s about customer engagement, concision, coding and creative content. This is supposed to be the guide to how do you actually get it really into the P&L.”

Zemmel spoke with theCUBE hosts Savannah Peterson and Rebecca Knight at Google Cloud Next 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the gen AI wave is changing odds in the enterprise world. (* Disclosure below.)

‘Rewired’ and the accelerating the gen AI wave

Zemmel, who co-authored the book “Rewired,” believes the knowledge shared in the book is crucial for advancing the general AI conversation. “Rewired” serves as an essential guide for achieving success in the realm of gen AI, particularly because many companies are facing challenges with their digital transformation efforts. Certain critical elements are often overlooked or missing in these efforts, which the book addresses, providing a clearer path to success in this rapidly evolving field, Zemmel added.

“Ninety-one percent of companies have something called the digital transformation, but if you then say, ‘Who’s making money on it?’ About 25% of them only are hitting their cost objectives, and about 30% are hitting their revenue objectives … something isn’t working,” Zemmel said. “We said let’s actually take 200 of the examples that work, and let’s develop the playbook.”

Gen AI is propelling the growth in intelligent coaching, as well as highly regulated and sensitive markets, such as healthcare. This is because the gen AI wave is emerging as a stepping stone toward better and enhanced human connections, according to Zemmel.

“We’re seeing the conversation move from being about productivity to being about growth. There’s this one study from the U.K. last summer that really opened up lots of people’s eyes on growth. This was a group of academics who wanted to see if patients could tell the difference between were they talking to a doctor who was texting them or were they talking to one of the chat bots,” Zemmel explained. “The patients overwhelmingly preferred the chat bot. They thought it was more informative … they also thought it was more empathetic.”

As the gen AI wave takes center stage in the modern era, reskilling the current workforce is critical. As a result, aligning business and technology incentives is needed, as this boosts the scaling and adoption of gen AI. McKinsey Digital helps with this objective, Zemmel pointed out.

“Think about the whole business system; that’s where you start to see the 40, 50, 60% improvement, which you can see in the P&L,” he said. “It’s the structured process of taking your employees through that, both your frontline employees who are using it in a hands-on way but also the leadership team who need to know how to get value from it. We do transform businesses through the power of AI. We do digital business building, and then we do core technology modernization. Cloud was always our core technology modernization practice.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2024:

(* Disclosure: McKinsey & Company sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither McKinsey nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE