Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to make waves in the enterprise market with ABI Research, a global technology intelligence firm, predicting it to pump over $450 billion into the enterprise sector across twelve different verticals in the next seven years.

Generative AI has expanded rapidly in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market with applications like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude 2, Llama2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

Interestingly, the report suggests that the true economic potential of generative AI extends far beyond the B2C market, with the enterprise sector poised to reap the most significant benefits.

Reece Hayden, Senior Analyst at ABI Research, stated “A range of job roles in content-heavy verticals like marketing and education are already seeing disruption in the first wave of adoption.”

“The current wave of adoption will not be revolutionary. Rather, it will have an internal focus by augmenting employee productivity by providing generative tools.”

Three waves of AI adoption

Hayden continued to note three waves of AI adoption. The second wave will expose the enterprise market to more external services. With maturing trust in generative AI, there’s an opening for enterprises to start “building products or services around it.”

Industries like healthcare and legal are projected to increasingly lean on generative AI to construct essential services, such as managing patient health trends or developing chatbots to answer healthcare queries.

According to Hayden, the third wave of adoption could be the most significant contributor to value creation. This wave might see sectors like manufacturing and logistics employing generative AI to automate and streamline processes. Despite the opportunities, this also brings inherent risks, such as possible adverse outcomes of AI hallucinations.

As many enterprises are reported to lack a defined corporate strategy, leading to potentially fragmented deployments, a more careful and measured approach to enterprise deployment is thus recommended by ABI.  The strategy should include a central corporate plan for generative AI usage, governance, legal policy, and expected business outcomes.

As with any emerging technology, it’s uncertain how the generative AI market will evolve, especially considering the global regulation anticipated to take effect in the next two years.

However, given the existing use cases and the potential value at stake, ABI Research projects that generative AI will become an integral part of verticals and business processes over the next seven years.