By: Sudhir Chaturvedi, Whole-Time Director & President, Markets, LTIMindtree

The ability to predict the future is central to society. Today, we try to predict everything, from the outcome of the ball game this evening to the weather tomorrow morning, from the state of the stock market this month to the likely value of our investments next year and the possibility of a pandemic in the next decade. The availability of data and statistical models has made this possible. But we are now poised at a radical moment in the history of civilizations: for the first time, we have Generative AI (Gen AI), a technology that is as smart as us, if not more. This technology will do for creativity what statistical models did for data.

The World Economic Forum captured the coming change with remarkable exactness: “Until just a few months ago, AI was a mysterious and obscure technology for most of us. Millions of people are chatting with mesmerizingly powerful AI tools that use everyday language. Suddenly, the vast potential of generative AI is dawning on us.”[i] Recently, when the results of an LTIMindtree study called The State of Generative AI Adoption came in, it set me thinking: The children of Millennials—let’s call these youngsters ‘Gen AI Natives’—weaned on Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLM) and algorithmic dopamine will be different. But how different will they be, and what will businesses do to address this new generation of customers?

Before exploring the answer, let’s understand that Digital Natives[ii], in direct contrast to Analog Natives before them, grew up with technologies like the Internet and the mobile phone. The primary life experience of Digital Natives for everything, from shopping, entertainment, playing, and banking to studying, finding a partner, and giving job interviews, has been online. When they say, “Let’s meet,” they mean on Teams, Google Meet, Zoom or Slack.

In the early 2000s, a friend said he would admit his Millennial children to a school where using the mobile phone was a formally taught life skill. I assumed he was joking. Now, I think back on that remark and am convinced he meant it seriously. Whatever the case, today, parents and teachers must help children with Gen AI. As it turns out, in the wake of the “wildly popular AI chatbot ChatGPT,” the MIT Technology Review has thoughtful advice for parents. It offers six tips on how to give your children an AI education in the times of Gen AI. The first is to remember that AI is “not a friend,” and the last is “not to miss out on what AI is actually good at!”[iii]

Clearly, Gen AI Natives (born in 2017, the year Google introduced the first transformer[i] and after) will be a step ahead. They are growing up with super-intelligent technology that will enable a profound shift in their thinking. One good way to sense the nature of the change is to understand that technology, until now, has been used to improve productivity, efficiency, accuracy, convenience, and compliance. For the first time, with Gen AI, we have tools that aid and improve creativity. So, the expectations of this generation, their work ethics, and social behavior will be radically different.

While CEOs rush to add Gen AI into the upskilling syllabus of their workforce, product designers, marketers, and human resource specialists must align themselves with the experience curve this new generation expects. Our study of early adopters shows that almost three-quarters of leaders are upskilling staff for future use of Gen AI. They see Gen AI as the perfect way to personalize and refine products and experiences, but our study shows that content and creativity are low priorities. Only two in five companies have reported content generation as the key reason for adopting Gen AI. This is as it should be. The technology is new. Investing in it to pursue the primary business goals –income and profitability—is a ground reality. Our study reflects this, showing that 33 percent of leaders see Gen AI increase income by 20 percent or more.

But organizations should note what looms over the horizon. One of the most hotly debated concerns is AI hallucination. Gen AI models with their LLMs often tend to make up answers that sound convincingly factual. This is because the training data for these models, primarily acquired off the Internet, is unreliable. In addition, training the models is expensive. Therefore, these models must live with the reality of data cut-off—meaning the LLM will remain unaware of anything beyond the training. Techniques to neutralize the hallucinations and bridge the gaps are being developed, but it will be some time before streaming real-time input becomes financially viable.

Aside from misleading “hallucinatory content,” Gen AI enables the creation of deep fakes. This will make Gen AI Natives cautious of the technology. They will live in a world where the quality of content used to personalize experiences and shape their behavior will always be suspect.

The question, “Can I trust my provider?” will always haunt them. So, organizations adopting Gen AI will do well to remember that the coming generation will highly prize ethical processes, transparency, and regulatory compliance. Taking a proactive approach by embedding ethical practices and transparency into processes touched by Gen AI will soon separate the leaders from the laggards.

Generation Alpha or Gen AI Natives?

There are minor differences in terminology around Gen AI Natives. Some organizations may prefer to use Generation Alpha – as is the case with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Interestingly, the IEEE has determined that the children of Millennials, born after 2010 – the year iPads were launched – comprise Generation Alpha. Know more about how the IEEE thinks AI will impact the coming generation, from infancy to retirement.

Our study distills the strategies of 450 leading decision-makers around Gen AI. It looks at who is adopting the technology, why it is being adopted, and the best ways to guarantee successful adoption. 

[i] The golden age of AI: Why ChatGPT is just the start, World Economic Forum, March 24, 2023: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/generative-ai-chatgpt-machinelearning/

[ii] The Millennial Generation, born 1977-1995

[iii] You need to talk to your kid about AI. Here are 6 things you should say, Rhiannon Williams and Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, September 5, 2023: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/05/1079009/you-need-to-talk-to-your-kid-about-ai-here-are-6-things-you-should-say/

[iv] Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding, Jakob Uszkoreit, Google Research, August 31, 2017: https://blog.research.google/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html