What to know about generative AI: insights from the World Economic Forum 

Generative AI is drawing ever wider circles across science, industry, public services and our daily lives. At the same time, it’s still a rapidly evolving technology. This piece rounds up some of the World Economic Forum’s research in these areas, from governing genAI to how it’s transforming areas such as education, health and finance.

Governance of generative AI has lagged behind the pace at which people have been innovating with the technology.

The Forum has been using its convening power to bring together various stakeholders in the AI Governance Alliance to work towards a framework for managing AI equitably and responsibly.

One of its outcomes was the Presidio AI Framework, which aimed to understand the many opportunities genAI presents while putting in guardrails to manage new risks such as hallucinations, misuse and lack of traceability. Other recommendations from the Alliance focused on enabling a responsible transformation with genAI within businesses, and international globalization and harmonization of AI governance.

Central to all those discussions is data equity, something that can be defined as equitable representation, access, features and outcomes of genAI, according to the Forum’s briefing paper Data Equity: Foundational Concepts for Generative AI. The goal of the Forum’s initiative is to enshrine fundamental principles of justice, non-discrimination, transparency and inclusive participation for the development and application of genAI.

When deployed ethically and responsibly, AI can even become a force for social innovation and shaping societies, the Forum adds in its white paper AI for Impact: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Social Innovation.

One sector where questions of governance and managing AI risks has become most visible is the media industry. The Forum’s Principles for the Future of Responsible Media in the Era of AI highlights that at a time when trust in the media is already declining, genAI creates additional risks as well as opportunities. The paper sketches a framework for a transparent, accountable and well-skilled media industry.

When it comes to the responsible use of genAI, investors also have a pivotal role to play, as the Forum’s Responsible AI Playbook for Investors points out. The need to ensure all AI applications are “honest, helpful and harmless” is not just a technological question but a strategic priority for the investment community. AI must be developed and deployed responsibly to boost risk-adjusted returns.

When it comes to sectors that stand to benefit from AI, education ranks very highly. AI can help personalize learning, simplify administrative tasks to free up teachers’ time and help address the global teacher shortage. At the same time, the potential impact of genAI in educational settings means that great care has to be taken so that it is deployed responsibly and equitably, the Forum stresses in its report Shaping the Future of Learning: The Role of AI in Education 4.0.

Incorporating AI in all its facets – as a teaching tool and a subject alike – will be vital to giving future jobseekers the skills to succeed in a world of work utterly transformed by AI. As the Future of Jobs Report 2023 underlines, AI will displace many jobs but it will create disproportionately more new ones. Workers must be ready to snap up those opportunities.

The world’s overburdened healthcare systems are also looking to genAI to improve their care delivery and quality. A white paper by the World Economic Forum, Patient-First Health with Generative AI: Reshaping the Care Experience, discusses how AI applications can bridge gaps in patients’ health journeys, such as providing accurate patient information, ensuring adequate care, or assisting patients with managing their conditions. Again, to succeed, responsible use of AI will be vital, especially to overcome cultural barriers and mistrust among both clinicians and the public.

In its report Scaling Smart Solutions with AI in Health: Unlocking Impact on High-Potential Use Cases, the Forum homes in on what this might look like. Outlining the most promising applications of AI in healthcare, it stresses the need for advancing the use of AI through multilateral partnerships across health systems, consumers, governments and civil society.

Health use cases are just one of many ways AI is used in a scientific context, where advances in deep learning and generative AI are transforming the entire scientific discovery process. The technology is increasingly enabling discoveries that would have been virtually impossible without AI's computational power and speedy scientific discovery.

There is a similar momentum happening in manufacturing, which has been undergoing a fundamental transformation as digitalization has progressed over the past decade. Today, its leading innovators – brought together by the Forum in its Global Lighthouse Network – are deepening their use of technologies including genAI to pervade every part of their value chains.

These manufacturing leaders also show the coordination required for any industry or application of genAI and associated technologies to succeed. Lighthouses are working to upskill their talent, adopt agile working principles and fully embrace technology to achieve scale.