From hype to helpful assistant: Being realistic about what GenAI can do for your business operations

Fujitsu / April 16, 2024

Uvance Hybrid IT AI Digital Transformation

As it reshapes our everyday lives, Generative AI (GenAI) has wide-ranging impact in all aspects of business operations. The beginning of the AI era across industries provides a clear signal that GenAI is more than a fleeting trend – it is a transformative force propelling businesses into the future.
At the heart of this transformation is GenAI's unparalleled capacity to analyze and synthesize vast quantities of data, bringing a new age of efficiency and innovation. It promises to streamline business processes, enhance decision-making, and strengthen the foundations of infrastructural operations.
However, at this pivotal juncture, it's crucial to recognize that GenAI's true potential can only be harnessed when strategically aligned with a company's overarching vision and human expertise. It is not a universal solution but a strategic instrument that, when carefully targeted in its application, can shape a competitive edge and catalyze growth.
Fujitsu approaches GenAI as a strategic assistant for virtually any role or function. We firmly believe in its value as a supportive enhancement to human capabilities, complementing and amplifying the creative forces within your teams and systems.

Understanding the GenAI landscape
Integrating GenAI into enterprise infrastructure and operations
Fujitsu’s vision for GenAI
Embracing GenAI with a strategic mindset

Understanding the GenAI landscape

With the ability to process and generate natural language on a scale previously unseen, GenAI is redefining the parameters of what machines can do in a business context. This technology's potential to enhance human productivity extends across various operational domains – from enhancing coding practices with tools like GitHub Copilot, to dramatically simplifying interactions with service desks through advanced natural language processing.

Despite its expansive capabilities, the deployment of GenAI is often accompanied by misconceptions and operational hurdles. A common misbelief is that GenAI tools can independently tackle complex business problems without any human input, which overlooks the enhanced efficiency that arises when GenAI is paired with human expertise and direction. Furthermore, the accuracy and reliability of GenAI is continuously improved through machine learning, particularly in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs) that power GenAI. These LLMs perform contextual data extraction and evolve by learning from patterns and feedback, but they still necessitate human validation to ensure their suggestions are pertinent and valuable, enhancing trust in the outputs generated.

With the adoption of GenAI, technical and organizational challenges also become apparent, including concerns about data privacy and the necessity for comprehensive datasets for effective model training. Moreover, integrating GenAI solutions with current IT infrastructure demands meticulous planning and execution to maintain seamless functionality and data integrity. Essential to this integration is the development of a curated, relevant knowledge base that evolves without compromising access to new data sources, such as partner knowledge bases. This ensures the continuous relevance of the data, even as it expands. Incorporating GenAI responses into actionable business processes requires significant adjustments, highlighting the need for ongoing training for support staff. Such measures are crucial to prevent the introduction of new vulnerabilities and to ensure that the organization can adapt to and capitalize on GenAI capabilities effectively.

A strategic approach to GenAI deployment is therefore not just desirable but essential. Focusing on areas where GenAI can deliver substantial value, businesses must align these innovations with their strategic goals and objectives to maximize benefits.

Integrating GenAI into enterprise infrastructure and operations

In our ongoing effort to elevate service delivery, Fujitsu is incorporating GenAI within our operational frameworks, recognizing the significance of GenAI in augmenting human capabilities. Our approach is comprehensive, encompassing a range of use cases for how we can leverage GenAI to support our customers:

As a software engineering assistant…

In software development, our support in utilizing GenAI tools such as GitHub Copilot is empowering customers to adopt a more collaborative and efficient development process. By integrating GenAI within Infrastructure as Code (IAC) practices and testing frameworks, we're not just accelerating development timelines but elevating the quality of the resulting code. GenAI’s utility transcends mere task comprehension; it’s also about bringing precision and depth to the engineering process, informed by human expertise.

As a support and operations assistant…

We are enhancing customer service by developing bots that provide quicker, more precise responses, underscoring our dedication to not just advancing service delivery but also boosting customer satisfaction. GenAI is employed in conjunction with our Service Management tool, enabling an innovative approach to querying high-priority incidents that have been preempted through AIOPS or are nearing escalation. GenAI also works alongside security incident detection and other technologies, transforming technical data into actionable insights, which enhances response times and improves decision-making efficiency.

As a data insights assistant…

We also recognize the importance of applying GenAI beyond just basic tasks, focusing on strategic, high-value activities that prompt meaningful insights if you ask the right question. The effectiveness of GenAI-driven customer insight relies on access a broad and relevant knowledge base, which is continuously improved through feedback loops and data generated by observability and AIOPS tools, enhancing response accuracy. However, this knowledge base requires deliberate and skilled human curation to expand, ensuring that GenAI solutions not only respond to queries but also offer insights that are accurate, informative, and genuinely helpful. As an example, by applying GenAI to derive meaningful insights into the IT environment and the evolving conditions of infrastructure and services, it empowers engineering teams to take proactive measures to minimize service disruptions and improve business performance.

Fujitsu’s vision for GenAI

Fujitsu’s vision for the implementation and integration of GenAI is a multifaceted one, deeply ingrained in our expansive experience with over 7,000 AI projects delivered globally over the last 30 years. We have crafted a comprehensive suite of end-to-end services that range from consultancy and strategic development to practical AI solution deployment through our innovation platform, Kozuchi. Kozuchi is a testament to the power of strategic integration, blending disparate AI functionalities into a cohesive suite of capabilities that encompass AutoML, AI for Vision, Predictive Analytics, AI for Text, Explainable AI (XAI) for identifying causal relationships between datasets, and AI Trust, addressing ethics, quality and security considerations.

The Kozuchi platform embodies our commitment to seamlessly integrating GenAI, ensuring that its deployment delivers tangible value and aligns with a company's broad business objectives. Through the intelligent combination of GenAI with other AI domains, Kozuchi transforms individual technologies into a powerful suite of services thereby advancing our customers' strategic ambitions.

Fujitsu leverages GenAI with a focus on societal progress, aiming to improve quality of life, address sustainability issues, and enhance human productivity. Aligned with our Fujitsu Way philosophy, we recognize GenAI's potential to develop impactful solutions in these vital areas and offer consulting services to ensure its integration brings value across industries. Through investments in proprietary technologies and strategic partnerships with leading research institutions and technology companies, we position ourselves at the forefront of GenAI innovation with a focus on making significant contributions to societal advancement.

Embracing GenAI with a strategic mindset

In today’s digital era, GenAI has garnered widespread interest and enthusiasm. However, its adoption demands a strategic and cautious approach from enterprises. The true power of GenAI lies in its potential to amplify human capabilities and enhance business processes. To harness this power, businesses should target processes that are crucial to the business and can benefit from GenAI capabilities. Fujitsu's approach for GenAI implementation emphasizes the creation of safeguards and verification mechanisms to foster an environment of explainable AI, ensuring a transparent and intuitive GenAI experience. We navigate the intricacies of GenAI with you, customizing solutions to meet your specific needs, and unlocking GenAI’s capacity to unlock insights from extensive datasets for streamlined operations and improved decision-making.

Discover how Fujitsu is leading the charge in GenAI innovation with our Kozuchi platform and see how we advocate for societal transformation by building trust in technology.

Tim Moody

Vice President of Fujitsu Uvance Hybrid IT

Tim is a collaborative and enthusiastic technology leader with a depth of experience designing and delivering enterprise class services across both public and private sector. As a Fujitsu Fellow and Fujitsu Distinguished Engineer, he has a demonstrable record of accomplishment, delivering business innovation as both an individual contributor or leading large teams across a broad range of leading-edge technologies.

Stephen Pye

Technical Consultant at Fujitsu

Steve's background encompasses threat intelligence and incident response, with a recent focus on SOAR and MDR. Steve is dedicated to optimizing processes and strengthening security through automation and cutting-edge tools.