Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a game-changer for everyone. Together with data, AI has become a key component of a robust digital core—the main source of competitive advantage for companies today. The advent of generative AI marks the beginning of a new era, one where businesses reinvent how they work. Just search for ChatGPT if you haven’t already, and you’ll get an idea of the possibilities. ChatGPT is derived from a large language model (LLM)—GPT4—developed by Open AI, which is a foundation model capable of generating human-like language and carrying out complex tasks across a number of functions.

We are entering an era of AI industrialization, where entire industries stand to be transformed by new, innovative applications of generative AI. One of the highest barriers to unlocking business value using generative AI and LLMs, however, is customizing and fine-tuning the pre-trained foundation models for their unique needs, using their own data. That’s why Accenture is partnering with Scale AI.

Generative AI partner spotlight: Scale AI

Accenture’s collaboration with Scale AI focuses on helping enterprises use their own data on general purpose models, customizing them to suit their business needs. According to CEO and founder Alexandr Wang, Scale AI has been “quietly powering this generative AI wave, providing the data and infrastructure for many of the top companies to actually build large-scale foundation models, including Open AI.”

Accenture and Scale AI are collaborating to provide an enterprise LLM platform for enterprise and government clients to fine-tune generative AI models that can learn from human input through a process called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). The result is generative models optimized for human interaction that are able to improve how people live and work.

For example, Scale AI was able to help retail clients gain higher shopping conversion and sales by using AI-generated product images for their newest products. And with social media clients, AI-generated content led to more than 100 million impressions.

Could humans have done this? Absolutely – but at what cost to the business?

This is business augmentation at the intersection of human and machine. By freeing up employees from automatable, routine tasks, we can redirect energy and focus to more strategic creative work that requires human intuition, decision-making and problem-solving skills - work that generative AI cannot do—at least not yet. The combination of human plus machine results in more efficient processes, improved decision-making and greater innovation.

Success with generative AI depends as much on people and training as it does on technology. It’s up to business leaders to take the lead in upskilling employees and reshaping jobs and tasks to get the most out of technologies like generative AI.

Thanks to partnerships like this one with Scale AI, Accenture helps leaders create business value with generative AI technology quickly and at scale.