After over a year of ChatGPT’s inception and its remarkable success (ChatGPT hit its 100 million user base within just two months), it is safe to say that Gen AI will stay.
And why just ChatGPT? A survey by McKinsey, conducted in April 2023, showed that 79% of respondents had at least some exposure to Gen AI, whether for work or outside of work. Imagine the survey results today, with Gen AI emerging into our workflows one use case at a time.
Be it customer support, marketing, or finance, Gen AI is quickly becoming the go-to place for ‘accurate’ and ‘fast’ resolutions. These two words would hardly sit next to each other before Gen AI.
However, some founders and CEOs still have their inhibitions about Gen AI. Myths like outsourcing Gen AI are too costly or Gen AI will replace human employees, holding them back from experiencing the magic that the AI technology is capable of.
And that’s precisely why this article. Here, we are ready with a hammer to burst the five most common AI myths. Let’s get started.
Myth 1 : Building Gen AI is more cost-effective than buying or partnering with AI vendors
It is always a good idea to perform a buy vs. build analysis before investing in a new technology. We are not saying that building Gen AI tools is a bad idea. It is, considering the amount of control it brings an organization. But, if you are going by the cost estimates, let us tell you that building an in-house Gen AI tool is costlier.
The cost of building AI in-house
Multiple factors are associated with building AI, including prototype development, cost of software, and maintenance. While no estimated fixed cost is involved, and the overall cost depends on your AI tool and its features, this news article gave us some ballpark figures.
- The average cost of prototyping starts at $25,000, and software costs up to $50,000.
- You’ll have to also use AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, which offer pay-as-you-go pricing. The costs of these platforms range from a few cents per hour to several $ per hour based on more powerful instances.
- The cost of maintenance of AI software is upwards of $60,000/year
- This shoots the overall cost to a minimum $100,000 or more in a year, which isn’t considering the talent costs.
There are several other factors that directly or indirectly affect the overall cost of in-house AI development, such as:
- What intelligence level do you aim to achieve for the AI tool?
- What kind of data would you feed it for training purposes? Structured or unstructured?
- What is the accuracy level you are expecting?
The biggest part of building an in-house AI tool is hiring the right talent. The story of South American Bank is a staggering example of how hiring the right tech talent is anything but cheap. The bank started a digital transformation project to move from brick-and-mortar to a cloud environment. They felt building an in-house team for this project would be better than outsourcing. South American Bank had a remarkable realization in the hiring process: within a year, its hiring volume had increased by 30%, leading to an expensive hiring process.
Now, let’s examine the other side of this myth: the cost of partnering with an AI vendor.
The cost of buying a third-party AI solution
A third party AI vendor typically costs between $0 to $40,000 a year. Thanks to tiered or feature-based subscription plans, most conversational AI platforms allow you to select specific features. Almost every third party AI vendor offers custom pricing plans for enterprises, so they pick their features and integrations, request new features, and pay only for these selections.
Plus, not to mention that mostly, AI vendors like Alltius come with experienced AI leadership and teams which can help you implement AI systems without investing heavily in talent. Alltius also provides white glove services along with training your workforce to reduce the gap between Gen AI plans and implementation.
A third party AI solution like Alltius, is much more flexible regarding features and pricing; there is no need for maintenance or infrastructure management, and you only pay a monthly subscription cost, which could be user-based, feature-based, or usage-based.
Wondering how much you’ll save? Check our ROI calculator which provides a rough estimate of your savings if you implement Gen AI at your company!
Myth 2: You have the option to wait and see how Gen AI works out before making a decision
There is no harm in running a few pilot sessions before you adopt Gen AI. We understand where you are coming from. Adopting a new technology like Gen AI can be overwhelming; things could worsen if employees resist change.
But there is one thing you must realize: the Gen AI storm is at its peak. You might sink into it later if you don’t adapt to it now. At least, that’s what happened with brands like Nokia and BlackBerry, which tried to resist change and eventually became obsolete.
In the past four years, Gen AI adoption has been stronger than ever. According to IBM’s survey, 6 out of 10 IT professionals have indicated the active implementation of Gen AI in their enterprises, while 34% are currently exploring the potential of this technology.
The right AI platform delivers results within as early as two months. Alltius, a Gen AI assistant platform, helped AngelOne, a financial service company, reduce its customer support ticket volumes by 20% and helped solve 65% of their 100k+ tickets using self serve within just two months. Read how Alltius helped AngelOne
This means that by the time you decide to adopt an enterprise AI platform, your competitors will be far ahead of you as they made the right choice at the right time.
“Evolving is the key to success for your organization or the Gen AI technology. Make sure to adopt it at the right time so you don’t fail to catch up in the future as your technology debts reach the sky limit.” Vibs Abhishek, CEO, Alltius.
Myth 3: Gen AI will constantly hallucinate
AI hallucination occurs when a Gen AI tool provides flawed or incorrect output. It is frequent and can have a minor to deadly impact on an organization’s workflow. But that doesn’t mean Gen AI applications will always hallucinate.
You have to understand why AI hallucinates. It is because of the data on which it is trained. If your Gen AI system is trained on inaccurate, unauthentic, and incomplete datasets, it is bound to affect the final output. There will be factual errors and incorrect information in the output. It also depends on other parameters.
But you have to understand that Gen AI will not always hallucinate. In fact, Gen AI technology was always there; it didn’t undergo a huge revolution within the last two years. Gen AI actually took consistent steps and improved its algorithms and data quality to reach where it is now. And it will only get better from here.
Gen AI applications are already fighting these hallucinations. With frameworks like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), AI hallucinations can be prevented. According to an article by IBM, RAG focuses on improving the quality of AI-generated responses by “grounding the model on external sources of knowledge to supplement the LLM’s internal representation of information.”
For companies to be on the safe side, it is a must to perform a rigorous AI hallucination check before investing in a third-party AI vendor. Gen AI platform, Alltius, uses a combination of different anti-hallucination methodologies to reduce AI hallucinations drastically.
“At Alltius, all AI assistants go through rigorous testing of at least 5000+ conversations of various degrees of complexity! We try to cover all end use cases to ensure your Gen AI applications doesn’t hallucinate in front of your customers.”, said Vibs Abhishek, CEO of Alltius.
Alltius is uses novel methodology which enables it to give “I don’t know” as an answer instead of providing an incorrect or assumption-based response. Due to this, Alltius has the ability to promise over 90%+ accuracy out of box and 99% accuracy in answers with fine-tuning. Alltius has demonstrated high accuracy of over 99.99% on customer facing Gen AI applications at MatchBook, AngelOne and AssuranceIQ.
See how you can implement secure Gen AI applications that don’t hallucinate!
Myth 4: Generative AI will replace employees
It is a common misconception among employees, CEOs, and executives that AI will replace them. But that’s not the right approach. AI will rather simplify employees’ jobs by removing routine tasks from their workflows and building a productive workforce.
A report published by McKinsey explains that between 2016 and 2030, 15% of the global workforce—close to 400 million workers — could be displaced by automation. However, the same report also suggests that automation will create new jobs and force as many as 375 million people to shift their occupational categories and upskill during this transition.
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Future of Jobs Report suggests while 85 million jobs may be displaced by 2025, 97 million new roles may emerge, driven by AI and other technological advancements.
New job categories require human creativity, empathy, and problem-solving skills, areas where AI currently falls short. AI lacks the nuanced understanding and emotional intelligence humans bring to complex decision-making processes. Jobs that require negotiation, empathy, and deep analytical and critical thinking skills are less likely to be fully automated.
AI assists in creative fields such as art, writing, and music but does not replace the unique human touch. For example, AI generated content, but human oversight is crucial for quality and authenticity.
No wonder roles such as AI trainers, data ethicists, and human-machine interaction designers are becoming increasingly important.
AI technologies automate repetitive tasks, allowing human employees to invest their time in addressing complex issues that require the emotional intelligence of a human being. For instance, a PwC study indicates that AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with productivity gains accounting for nearly half of this value.
It's time we realized that AI systems are designed to work in collaboration with humans, enhancing their capabilities rather than replacing them.
At Alltius, we believe that Gen AI is meant to help human counterparts do their jobs better. For example, in customer support scenarios, Gen AI support agent assistant can handle solving customer queries. The AI assistant can provide the drafted answer to the customer support agent, which saves time and effort. But the customer support agent can use the extra time to talk to the customer and build relationships, thus increasing the brand trust and loyalty.
Myth 5: Investing in Gen AI will automatically provide your organization with a competitive advantage
While we encourage you to keep a positive outlook toward AI adoption, we don’t promote the idea that AI will magically change everything and provide you with a strategic direction and competitive advantage overnight. It is a technology, not a magic wand.
For AI to work, you have to identify the appropriate use cases where it can make a difference. For example, customer support is a tried-and-tested use case where the application of relevant AI technologies makes a huge difference.
Take the example of a renowned digital lender wanting to reduce its support operational costs by improving its contact center. They would receive 10,000 support queries every day from different channels like emails and chats, and on average, customers would have to wait for 4-5 hours to resolve these queries. This would mean unhappy, frustrated customers and burned-out support employees.
Alltius, a Gen AI assistant platform, upgraded the company’s existing AI assistant to address up to 5,000 daily emails. This reduced the average customer waiting time to 2-3 hours, a solid 50% reduction. The agent’s job now shifted from crafting messages to validating the AI-generated messages, leading to higher productivity.
Our point is simple: The use case and AI tool you select form the foundation of your AI strategy. If any one of these goes wrong, achieving a competitive advantage will be lost.
Conclusion
If you believe in any one or more of these AI myths, we hope you now have a clear vision. Gen AI is a remarkable technology, and it will only evolve with time. As a CEO, you should take a positive approach to it, perform your due diligence before investing in AI technology, and find ways to simplify your employees’ lives by automating the right use cases.
If there are any specific customer support use cases that you want to automate, explore Alltius.
Wondering how Alltius can help you?
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