with 83 % of researchers reporting that their organizations plan to significantly increase AI investment in 2025.
It’ s already clear that the next major sea of change hitting our shores is associated with how we work with generative AI. The potential use cases are no longer abstract concepts or distant possibilities on the horizon.
By using AI to analyze large datasets, identify trends, and derive actionable insights enterprises can make datadriven decisions. Predictive analytics have effectively been used to forecast market trends and consumer behavior.
What businesses need to do is to invest in AI tools that will enable fast, efficient and accurate data collection, sentiment analysis, and customer segmentation.
The latest wave of AI tools is user-friendly and can perform tasks such as transcribing audio or video files, summarizing content, generating images and videos, and even writing code. A feeling of nervous excitement arises from the fact that generative AI applications possess the capability to formulate seemingly original content from basic prompts.
But there are also crucial gaps that exists in the realm of generative AI, which need to be dealt with so that businesses can make much out of their applications in research. The generative AI systems are trained on extensive datasets that inherently encode biases from the source material. They are therefore susceptible to errors and hallucinations, some of which are apparent while others are subtle.
That is why moving with the current trends blindly is unwise and one must be cautious and thoughtful on how to use the technologies now and consider their applications for the future.
At Ipsos we help businesses to drive innovation and growth by adapting to and harnessing the potential of emerging
technologies. AI is a prime example of such a technology that holds the power to fortify companies, making them more robust and adaptable in times of transformation.
But the use of AI must also come with greater ethical responsibility to address preconceptions, privacy issues, and openness to increase consumer trust.
Like many other African countries Kenya, currently has no specific laws or regulations that singularly regulate AI.
The Ministry of Information, Communications, and the Digital Economy is, however, working on a National AI Strategy in collaboration with various partners to address this gap.
Previous policy efforts include the 2019 Distributed Ledgers( Blockchain) and Artificial Intelligence Taskforce Report, which investigated and evaluated these two emerging technologies with significant promise for revolutionizing Kenya ' s economy.
According to the Taskforce’ s Report, the challenge in regulating AI is striking a balance between supporting innovation and competition while protecting consumers, market integrity, financial stability and human life.
The National AI Strategy whose draft was unveiled last year, therefore, aims to guide Kenya in the development, application, and governance of AI, ensuring the country harnesses the full potential of this emerging technology while safeguarding ethical considerations and national interests.
The overarching vision of the strategy is to position Kenya as a leader in AI innovation, attract investment, and create an environment that fosters creativity and ethical AI development. The strategy aims to leverage local datasets and talent, ensuring the AI landscape is both localized and globally competitive.
What’ s important is creating an enabling environment for AI by cultivating conditions where creative and innovative AI-driven solutions can flourish. This involves establishing frameworks that encourage the development, testing, and deployment of AI technologies tailored to our unique context and ensure that citizens and businesses can directly benefit from these advancements, experiencing tangible improvements in their daily lives and livelihoods.
At Ipsos, our continued investment in generative AI has enabled our teams to invent innovative applications within the privacy, security, and governance principles of Ipsos generative AI policy.
We believe the secret is in the human-AI partnership, having the right conversations and providing“ coaching” via prompts. As prompt quality is one key driver of outcome quality, Ipsos has created prompt guidelines for optimal prompt engineering and will continue to evolve them.
Based on our AI quality assessment results, Ipsos has already started developing a domain-specific prompt library. These will allow us to leverage our proprietary domain( research and category) knowledge and scientific framework intellectual property( IP) within our internal Ipsos chatbot.
Ipsos has been an active advocate of storytelling for a long time and has been providing training to its researchers on this skill for years. As AI automates basic tasks such as summarization, storytelling is becoming even more crucial. Generative AI would enable research teams to devote more time to crafting impactful stories, elevating insights, and activating findings to drive business outcomes.
Ipsos stands ready to help its clients be sure when navigating AI. With a clear understanding of the quality from generative AI we can assess the risks and the timing around each wave of emerging technological transformation and help clients maximize their outputs.
By leveraging AI, social marketing research can become more precise, timely, and impactful, helping researchers to understand their target audience and design more effective campaigns.
Chris Githaiga, is the Ipsos in Kenya Managing Director and the Country Manager, East Africa Cluster. You can commune with him on this or related matters via email at: Chris. Githaiga @ ipsos. com.