Growing numbers of businesses are now moving past the experimentation phase and adopting generative AI (Gen AI) for practical use cases. Gartner says Gen AI will drive a near-10% spike in global IT spending this year, while Deloitte reports that almost three-quarters of UK leaders believe these technologies will substantially transform their organisation in the next three years.
It’s an exciting shift, as Gen AI stands to unlock new levels of creativity, problem-solving, and automation. However, before adopting these technologies, businesses need to establish strong data foundations, including quality, governance and trust, agility in data engineering, and AI literacy. Without these elements in place, Gen AI will not function effectively or deliver the results businesses are anticipating. In the consumer world, more than 400 million people use ChatGPT as a standalone platform to harness the power of Gen AI. However, enterprise-level adoption requires a more sophisticated approach — businesses can’t simply use Gen AI ‘out of the box’. To function at scale, Gen AI needs to be built on a base layer of quality data that is contextualized for the environment in which the enterprise is operating. Without this, it is likely to give unreliable, biased and incorrect outputs, leading to hallucinations and compliance risks.
Laying the ‘left-brain’
To make the most of Gen AI, businesses should think of it as working like the two sides of a human brain. The right-brain drives creativity, innovation and problem-solving—areas where Gen AI excels. But this creative potential needs a balance, and that’s role of the left-brain. Just like in human beings, the AI left-brain governs logic, which requires a robust foundation of data. Before embedding Gen AI in their processes, businesses need to ensure the left-brain is well-prepared to provide the structure and inputs needed to keep the right-brain grounded in reality.
To start, they need to map the existing data landscape and build a robust architecture for analytics. Data aggregation, storage, and retrieval processes should all be reviewed to ensure that the business can feed Gen AI the inputs it needs in real-time. They then need to identify additional data sources that could be valuable, providing as much fuel as possible for Gen AI to draw more detailed conclusions that help to drive the business forward.
Next, businesses need to draw together and review this body of data to make sure it is clean and robust enough to reliably inform right-brain activity. Data is constantly evolving, so businesses need to have end-to-end visibility across all the inputs, so they can quickly identify and resolve any conflicts, confident they are using reliable, compliant data insights.
The final step to develop a strong left-brain is to use traditional, logic and reasoning based AI models to perform specific tasks. This is often referred to as ‘narrow AI’, but businesses should not let this description deter them. Narrow AI has an important role to play, identifying patterns in data, and making precise predictions that Gen AI can pull from to deliver actionable insights.
Moving from foundation to function
Once the left-brain foundation is in place, businesses can move forward and adopt Gen AI, knowing they have everything needed to drive creativity and unlock new capabilities. Pulling on left-brain inputs, Gen AI can generate intelligent data-driven recommendations that enhance decision-making and operational agility across various areas of the business.
For instance, this approach can transform marketing techniques such as audience match, where customer data is used to target potential buyers with tailored communications. The left brain – powered by traditional AI, can segment large volumes of customers based on statistical analysis of their attributes and historical behaviours, such as products they have purchased or campaigns they have previously engaged with. With this foundation, Gen AI — the right brain — can personify these segments and recommend targeted campaigns that sales and marketing teams can use to activate them, with a stronger likelihood of eliciting the desired response.
Achieving whole-brain AI success
To fully harness the power of generative AI, businesses must adopt a whole-brain strategy, aligning structured logic with creative intelligence. With strong left-brain foundations in place, Gen AI can function effectively, delivering innovative, data-driven solutions at scale. By balancing structure and creativity – just as the human brain does – businesses can unlock Gen AI’s full potential to innovate and create value.
