GenAI Project Examples: The Dance Of The Mouse And The Elephant

GenAI Project Examples: The Dance Of The Mouse And The Elephant

The recent fall in big tech stock prices has demonstrated how far market sentiment about generative AI (GenAI) has shifted since late 2023. The mood music has changed from wild enthusiasm to critical scepticism. The primary problem is the huge scale of investment in AI infrastructure compared with the tiny size of GenAI projects that have been announced in the market.

Customer examples provided by Toronto-based Cohere, which raised $500 million in a Series D round in July 2024, are a case in point. Named customers atomicwork, Flow AI and HyperWrite are small start-ups. The anonymized customer examples published by Cohere relate to multiple micro use cases such as ‘Employee Support AI Assistant’, ‘Internal AI Knowledge Assistant’, ‘Improved Search’ and ‘Security Documentation AI Assistant’. These are useful productivity tools. Some can scale across thousands of employees, whilst others only serve up insights to small technical groups. But none would be categorized as large-scale transformation of business processes using GenAI. And that is what AI vendors need to demonstrate, given the funding they have taken on board.

Accenture grabbed the headlines in June during its Q2 earnings call when Chair and CEO, Julie Sweet, announced that: “We [Accenture] also extended our early lead in generative AI with $1.1 billion in new bookings in the first half of the year”. Sweet further explained in the earnings call that: “The ability to use AI at scale, however, varies widely with clients on a continuum, with those which have strong digital cores generally seeking to move more quickly, while most clients are coming to grips with the investments needed to truly implement AI across the enterprise, and nearly all are finding it difficult to scale because the AI technology is a small part of what is needed”. The examples of ‘GenAI’ projects mentioned in the earnings call for clients like Belden, Best Buy, Mondelez International, Riyadh Air and Telstra were large-scale digital transformation projects that included an element of AI technology. Our view is that the $1.1 billion of new bookings should be seen as relating to projects with an AI component.

Where does this leave the enterprise AI market? On the one hand, there are hundreds of mouse-sized micro-use-case AI projects coming out of the tech vendors. They are small because they are designed around the potential of GenAI in a pureplay way, rather than being a digital business project. On the other hand, there are a few examples of elephant-sized digital transformation projects that include AI as part of the technical design. To demonstrate better product/market fit, buyers need to see examples of projects where AI plays a critical role in significant transformation. Those customer examples are hard to find.