How Did Companies Use Generative AI in 2023?

Thomas R. Lechleiter/the Wall Street Journal. Generative artificial intelligence emerged this year as the most buzzed-about new technology f...

Thomas R. Lechleiter/the Wall Street Journal.

Generative artificial intelligence emerged this year as the most buzzed-about new technology for businesses, promising to supercharge productivity while transforming the way white-collar work gets done. 

But AI’s high cost, need for specialized talent, and legal and privacy risks have stymied attempts to fully realize that promise, with many businesses cautious of moving beyond early experimentation. Still, there is little doubt that generative AI will completely reshape enterprise technology. And some businesses have already begun incorporating AI into their operations by using it to write code, create marketing and sales content, and bolster customer support.

 Enterprises worldwide will have spent around $19.4 billion on generative AI solutions by the end of 2023, according to an estimate from International Data Corp. That spending—which includes generative AI software and related hardware plus IT and business services—will reach $151.1 billion by 2027, the research firm forecasts, translating into a compound annual growth rate of 86.1% over the four-year period.  

Companies for the most part are testing the limits of the technology, reinvesting in AI and cloud more broadly as they organize their corporate data, assessing cybersecurity and other risks, and setting up guardrails for its safe use. Many chief information officers and chief technology officers are looking to 2024 as the year in which generative AI proves its worth and its high price tag.

Here are five companies that have figured out how to integrate generative AI into their products and operations, and what they learned in the process. Some including online travel agency Expedia have already put generative AI in front of customers, while others, such as healthcare system Mass General Brigham and construction software maker Bentley Systems, are targeting 2024.

Meet AI, your new interior decorator

Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture seller, is using generative AI to help customers redesign their living rooms. Once customers upload a photo of their living space, Wayfair’s Decorify tool uses the image-generation AI model Stable Diffusion to create new versions of it in styles such as glam and Midcentury Modern.

Aside from its design tool, most of Wayfair’s generative AI applications help improve employee productivity, proving that there is economic benefit to implementing the technology, said Fiona Tan, the company’s chief technology officer. In some cases, Wayfair will keep using its existing machine-learning models, which are cheaper to run and can carry out prediction and optimization solutions more effectively than generative AI.

Wayfair’s design tool, which is free to use, creates photorealistic images based on a customer’s uploaded photo. But because it relies on a generative AI model, that also means the occasional odd glitch such as a table leg that doesn’t look quite right, or instances where the AI can’t identify windows and mirrors, Tan said.

Decorify also gives customers prompts about Wayfair products that are similar to those in the AI image, helping connect the AI-generated world with the real one, according to Tan. The company said customers have created more than 100,000 designs and have purchased products via the tool since its launch in July. “This could be a very viable way to shop for things like your home and style-based categories, that are really hard for you to articulate what it is you really want. Being able to see that is helpful,” Tan said.

Picking the right AI with energy use in mind

Schneider Electric, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of electrical and automation products, is choosing AI models that are smaller—and therefore less energy intensive—for certain applications, said Philippe Rambach, the company’s chief AI officer. “Large language models are great in summarization, in text generation,” he said. “They can do things like forecasting and optimization, but not so great. And at the cost of both dollars and energy consumption, it doesn’t make sense.”

Generative AI runs on an immense amount of energy from data centers, which are supplied by electricity from strained power grids. AI could consume up to 3.5% of the world’s electricity by 2030, according to an estimate from IT research and consulting firm Gartner.

Schneider Electric, which makes goods such as light switches, electric-vehicle chargers and home-automation systems as well as energy-management software, chose to use OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model, which is much smaller and uses less energy than its latest systems, to power its internal company chatbot, Rambach said. The France-based company is also using generative AI to help its customers compute and analyze their carbon emissions as if they were conversing with the chatbot ChatGPT. 

Customers needed a way to use its Resource Advisor tool, which can visualize and track their energy data, in a faster and easier way than traditional software, Rambach said. The “copilot,” which was built using Microsoft’s OpenAI service, allows them to ask questions such as “which of my factories has the highest emissions?” he said.