Hello, I'm Tak@, a System Integrator.

In this column, I'll discuss how Generative AI can support and evolve organizational resilience, a crucial quality for companies to thrive in uncertain times.

Organizational resilience is a company's ability to not just avoid or recover from difficulties and unexpected changes, but to learn from them and grow stronger.

Think about it: the world today is full of sudden events—natural disasters, pandemics, cyberattacks, and more. To survive and prosper in such an environment, a company's ability to adapt flexibly to these changes and continue its operations is vital.

Highly resilient companies stay focused on their goals even in tough situations, collaborate effectively, and respond quickly to new circumstances. For example, there was a sales company for office equipment that was on the brink of bankruptcy. By implementing remote work and having the CEO engage in one-on-one discussions with every employee, they turned the situation around and even expanded into new business areas. Similarly, an airline company that saw a drastic reduction in passengers during a global pandemic temporarily seconded employees to other companies and encouraged skill development while creating new ventures. These are excellent examples of companies adapting to change and emerging stronger than before.

Clearly, organizational resilience is a critical strength that enables companies to overcome adversity and grow even more robustly.

How Generative AI Supports Organizational Resilience

Generative AI is incredibly useful for enhancing organizational resilience. This is because AI can process vast amounts of data at astonishing speeds, performing predictions, analyses, and information sharing in real-time—tasks that would be difficult for humans alone.

Specifically, Generative AI can assist in the following ways:

Predicting Disasters and Assisting with Response

AI analyzes weather data and seismic records to predict the likelihood of disasters with high accuracy. This allows companies to prepare adequately in advance, minimizing downtime for their operations. Major Japanese companies are already using AI to assess disaster risks and manage supply chain continuity.

Answering Employee Questions by Learning Internal Manuals

During a disaster, AI can learn internal rules and manuals to quickly answer employee questions. This helps reduce confusion and allows employees to act calmly, providing crucial information like where to evacuate or whom to contact immediately.

Improving Safety Confirmation Systems

AI can automatically send safety confirmation messages, support foreign languages, and analyze employee responses to quickly identify those who need help. By linking with smartphone location data, it can identify employees in disaster-affected areas and prioritize their safety confirmation. It can also automatically create training scenarios and provide real-time feedback during drills, leading to more practical training.

Streamlining Business Continuity Plans (BCP)

Companies can use AI to analyze various environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, predict future trends, and mitigate risks. This reduces the need for manual report generation, allowing for more frequent and faster public disclosure of information.

As you can see, Generative AI significantly enhances a company's ability to respond to unexpected events, building a foundation for recovery and growth in challenging situations.

"Prompt Engineering" for Utilizing Generative AI

To fully harness the power of Generative AI, "prompt engineering" is essential. The quality of AI's output varies significantly depending on the instructions given. Therefore, to achieve the intended results, it's crucial to design appropriate "prompts" (commands or instructions to the AI).

In prompt engineering, you clearly communicate to the AI "what you want to achieve," "what format you want the output in," and "what background information to consider." For example, instead of a vague instruction like "Write a poem about OpenAI," you would provide a more detailed instruction such as: "Write a short, inspiring poem about OpenAI, focusing on the recent announcement of their DALL-E AI image generation feature, in the style of a famous poet." This leads to more desirable results.

I personally believe that "Generative AI is the ultimate mashup tool!" and I enjoy building tools every day. For instance, my "AI Learning Planner" tool suggests an optimal learning plan based solely on your goals and timeframe. This was also born from creative prompt engineering that effectively communicated to the AI "what information I wanted."

In essence, prompt engineering is a critical skill for maximizing the power of Generative AI and achieving the results we intend.

Organizational Agility and the Future of AI

There's a perspective that organizational resilience isn't just about avoiding crises, but about the ability to adapt and grow through change. Traditional crisis management focused on following manuals and procedures, whereas organizational resilience emphasizes embracing the unpredictable, learning from failures, and responding flexibly.

AI has the potential to accelerate this "adaptation and learning" process. Its predictive and automated analysis capabilities assist human judgment, enabling quicker and better decision-making. While there are challenges in implementing AI, such as data quality, handling personal information, the potential for AI to generate biased information, and cost, overcoming these will lead to stronger organizations.

Prompt engineering will continue to evolve, and AI may even automatically generate optimal prompts in the future. However, at its core, human knowledge, experience, and critical thinking will remain indispensable. The advanced capabilities of AI are underpinned by the skilled techniques and judgment of the humans who use them.

Conclusion

Enhancing organizational resilience is paramount for companies in the modern era. Generative AI serves as a powerful tool to strengthen that resilience.

As "users" of AI, by understanding its characteristics and providing appropriate instructions (prompts), AI can unleash capabilities beyond our imagination, helping organizations overcome challenges.

It's crucial to view AI not just as a tool, but to embrace a mindset where humans and AI collaborate and grow together. The future is unpredictable, but by walking hand-in-hand with AI, we can build agile organizations capable of adapting to any change.

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