Businesses rely on consultants to get their expert advice in business operations. Now, along with the consultant service, many firms, including BCG, will provide generative AI assistance, too. Last week, Anthropic announced its partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to bring its AI models, including its Claude 2 assistant, to BCG customers. Also: 4 things Claude AI can do that ChatGPT can't Through the partnership, BCG will help inform its customers about the best ways to strategically apply AI and also help them deploy the Anthropic models in a way that is conducive to delivering business results. Some of the use cases for the businesses include "knowledge management, market research, fraud detection, demand forecasting, report generation, business analysis, and more," according to the release.

Consulting firms provide businesses with professional advice based on thorough research of a specific industry or area. As a result, consultancy firms have robust sources and research data -- and now McKinsey & Company has launched an AI chatbot to helps its clients access this information. On Thursday, McKinsey unveiled Lilli, its AI-powered search tool that gives clients and consultants easy access to the firm's vast stores of knowledge. When asked a question, Lilli scans the firm's databases and identifies five to seven relevant pieces of content, summarizes key points, includes links, and even identifies experts, according to a press release from McKinsey. McKinsey has a robust knowledge base that consists of more than 40 curated knowledge sources, 100,000 documents and interview transcripts, and a network of experts that spans 70 countries.

The AI field took a turn with the release of powerful Generative Artifical Intelligence (AI) models, and as a result, the world is seeing the automation of some skills around creativity and imagination sooner than many expected. For some organizations, Generative AI holds valuable potential for higher order opportunities, like new services and business models. Deloitte offers a method for selecting Generative AI use cases, as well as some next steps for business leaders in the Age of With . Generative AI has captured attention in global media and the public square, prompting questions and discussions around this transformative technology. Businesses, research organizations, and even lay users are experimenting with Generative AI, and given the excitement and interest, it is important to look more closely at the potential capabilities and implications for business.

Every business is a digital business. Yet Accenture shows that only 8% of companies are adopting a strategy of total enterprise reinvention. In the Accenture Technology Vision 2023 Report, researchers examine the movement from the physical to digital world. The report found 96% of executives agree that the convergence of digital and physical worlds over the next decade will transform their industry. And given how disconnected and disjointed our digital and physical worlds can feel, it's no wonder that the next decade of innovative efforts is starting to be defined by how we fuse the two together.

AI has exploded in popularity in recent years, to the point where it's no longer considered a luxury in the business world, but a necessity. A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study revealed that the adoption of AI will fuel a 14 percent increase in the global GDP by 2030, representing an additional $15.7 trillion surge to the global economy.1 Businesses using AI solutions are discovering new ways to tap into vast amounts of data to get clear insights and accelerate innovation. Thanks to advancements in graphics processing unit (GPU) computational power and the availability of tech services through cloud marketplaces, AI is now more accessible than ever. As companies look to do more with less, AI will play an increasingly critical role--particularly generative AI, a category of AI algorithms that generate new outputs based on data. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI can analyze large data sets and create entirely new content in a variety of media formats--including text, images, audio, and data--based on what's described in the input.

PwC said it partnered with AI startup Harvey for an initial 12-month contract, which the accounting and consulting firm said will help lawyers with contract analysis, regulatory compliance work, due diligence and other legal advisory and consulting services. PwC said it will also determine ways for tax professionals to use the technology. It said its access to Harvey's technology is exclusive among the Big Four professional services firms. Harvey is built on technology from OpenAI, the Microsoft Corp-backed startup that on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its AI sensation ChatGPT. Harvey received a $5 million investment last year in a funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.

This morning, Google announced a laundry list of new generative AI capabilities and features for developers, through a PaLM API and in Google Cloud, as well as new integrations for users of Google Workspace, including in Gmail and Google Docs. The announcements come just a month after Google unveiled its search chatbot Bard and less than a week after Bloomberg reported that a new internal Google directive "requires generative AI to be incorporated into all of its biggest products within months." The news also appears in advance of Microsoft's highly-anticipated virtual'Future of Work with AI' event this Thursday. Thanks to comments last week by Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun, that event is rumored to include the release a multimodal GPT-4, as well as a ChatGPT upgrade for Microsoft 365 applications such as Word and Outlook. During a virtual press briefing yesterday, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that the AI announcements "represent the culmination" of many years of work, including bringing together Transformer technology advances in reinforcement learning and advances in parallelism and orchestrating large training workloads.

Are ChatGPT and generative AI a blessing or a curse for security teams? While artificial intelligence (AI)'s ability to generate malicious code and phishing emails presents new challenges for organizations, it's also opened the door to a range of defensive use cases, from threat detection and remediation guidance, to securing Kubernetes and cloud environments. Recently, VentureBeat reached out to some of PWC's top analysts, who shared their thoughts on how generative AI and tools like ChatGPT will impact the threat landscape and what use cases will emerge for defenders. Follow VentureBeat's ongoing generative AI coverage Overall, the analysts were optimistic that defensive use cases will rise to combat malicious uses of AI over the long term. Below is an edited transcript of their responses.

Feb 10 (Reuters) - Generative AI models such as ChatGPT will slow down market share gains and deflate pricing for Indian IT companies in the short term, analysts at J.P.Morgan said on Friday. As generative AI is implemented more broadly, consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte and will gain market share over Indian IT firms like Infosys Ltd (INFY.NS) and Wipro Ltd (WIPR.NS) in the near term, analysts at the brokerage said in a note to clients. Generative AI can be a "deflation driver" in the near term on legacy services as they compete on pricing, necessitate staff retraining and drive loss of competitiveness, they added. "ChatGPT is likely to deflate legacy services the most and application services the least." Artificial intelligence company OpenAI's chatbot has dazzled amateurs and industry experts with its ability to spit out haikus, debug code and answer questions while imitating human speech, helping it attract a $10 billion investment from Microsoft Inc (MSFT.O) earlier this month.

Digital transformation (DX) is not just a differentiator but a matter of survival in the modern business world. And while a maelstrom of technologies, including cloud computing, mobility, IoT, and AR-VR, are delivering value and creating better experiences for customers, studies show that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play the most crucial role in driving businesses through DX. That said, while leading tech companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Google use AI and Machine Learning (ML) at scale in their core business processes, small and medium-sized enterprises often struggle to expand their machine learning projects beyond a small pilot scope. In a Deloitte survey involving 2,875 executives from 11 top economies, 79% of leading digital transformers (as against 49% of the starters) stated that their AI initiatives are essential to their market competitiveness. As a catalyst for digital transformation, AI helps companies become more data-driven, accelerate innovation, strengthen decision-making and increase productivity with better resource utilization in crucial business functions and domains.