delaware’s generative AI program focuses on value, governance, and lowering the threshold for use cases

Oct 02, 2023

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To further strengthen its position as an innovator, delaware is stepping up its investments in generative AI or genAI. “We believe genAI is more than a passing fad, and we want to be a leading, innovative partner for our ecosystem partners and our customers,” says senior manager Sven Arnauts, who is spearheading the program. The initiative represents delaware International’s biggest investment to date and it includes the training and enablement of its 5,000 consultants.

The group’s global genAI program has three major goals:

(Pro)actively helping clients create more value
Optimizing delaware’s internal processes
Developing good governance practices

As part of the program, every delaware entity worldwide will have a designated ‘AI Champion’. Sven: “GenAI is, without a doubt, the most important IT development of the last decade. Getting everyone on the same page quickly is essential. So while our initial push was global, delaware’s customer enablement and implementation will happen on the local level. That way, we remain true to our ‘glocal’ approach as well.”

delaware’s genAI triptych

The group approaches genAI from three perspectives: the customer, internal processes, and governance. The first two are all about the technology’s potential to increase efficiency and generate more value. “We’re developing new offerings , and taking our existing offerings to the next level,” says Sven. “Meanwhile, our ecosystem partners continue to take big steps as well. “Microsoft 365 Copilot will become generally available in November for enterprise-customers, while Salesforce (Einstein GPT, Tableau AI) and SAP are rapidly developing their own enterprise-graded genAI and copilot solutions as well.”

The third perspective, however, is all about making sure genAI is used for the right things. “People initially confused ChatGPT with a search engine. It’s a content creation tool. But to unlock its full potential, we need proper guardrails and good practices. Another example: GitHub Copilot makes it possible to build a simple website with just a few prompts instead of human-written code. However, that code still needs to be optimized and quality checked to eliminate errors, avoid performance issues and eliminate security risks. Finding the right balance between going fast and minimizing risk will be key.”

Generative AI will almost always give you an answer. That doesn’t mean it’s the right one.

Sven Arnauts, senior manager at delaware

“That being said, genAI’s potential for performance improvements is unparalleled. It allows us to generate texts, increase meeting efficiency, automate manual processes, … In programming, for example, there are mentions of 40% efficiency gains. But that’s only scalable and reliable if we keep quality checking the generated code. It’s a powerful assistant, but we will still need humans with critical minds to make the code performant and usable.”

Beyond the technological impact of genAI, delaware’s management consulting teams are also exploring the impact of these developments. In industries such as professional services, manufacturing, FMCG, or insurance, there is a lot of potential to use genAI as a driver for upgrading existing business and revenue models (or even create new ones).

Lowering the threshold

Another major objective of the program is to significantly lower the financial threshold for organizations to start experimenting with genAI. To make this possible, delaware has earmarked a considerable part of the project budget to set up use cases with its customers.

“In some organizations, getting the necessary funds to start a business use case can be challenging,” says Eric Hiernaux, Managing Director of delaware International. “By setting aside funding, we want to make sure these organizations get a fighting chance during this incredibly fast-moving and exciting era.”