This Week in AI: Smarter Healthcare, Enterprise Efficiencies, Misinformation Management

Machines don’t dream of electric sheep, but they can help predict where they’d flock.

That’s because generative artificial intelligence (AI), where bytes meet brains, is increasingly helping organizations of all sectors and sizes turn data into valuable decisions.

Per an investor note from Bank of America reported Wednesday (Oct. 11), corporate AI implementation could boost operating margins by 250 basis points over the next five years, equivalent to approximately $65 billion in cost savings.

The company also predicted that the innovative technology could have a sizable economic impact potentially reaching $15.7 trillion by the end of the decade.

Which is good news for the tech companies developing generative AI technology — because as it stands, the innovation is becoming quite a drag on their pockets due to its steep development and maintenance costs compared to the unit economics of yesteryear’s software.

As generative AI continues to accelerate change, these are the top stories PYMNTS has been tracking this week.

Founders and Executives on Capturing Gains From Corporate AI

The investor note about AI’s huge impact on the enterprise from Bank of America could be why large corporates continue to partner with Anthropic, a pioneer of the Constitutional AI method which produces allegedly “safer” AI models.

As PYMNTS wrote, interest and investment in Anthropic underscores the emerging reality of the AI ecosystem, where quality data and proprietary fine-tuning methods reign supreme when it comes to building a usable, scalable foundational model.

And in a conversation Wednesday, Lu Cheng, co-founder and CTO at Zip, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that no area is more ripe for generative AI-led disruption than the procurement function.

The challenge, Cheng epxlained, is in building trust in AI recommendations — the technology is already there and ready to help companies consolidate vendors, optimize payment terms and maintain accurate contract data.

In a separate Wednesday interview with PYMNTS, Walmart execs elaborated on how they are rolling out generative AI to empower customers to explore a more extensive selection of products and brands.

“Now, we can answer more complex and ‘mission-based’ customer questions, like giving lots of party planning ideas, instead of just returning a single item, like balloons. This means a wider range of products and brands can be seen in response to a single queries,” said Jon Alferness, chief product officer, Walmart U.S.

“Customers expect multimodal ways of shopping, and that means brands and retailers need to develop capabilities that can meet customers where they are, however, they need to shop. Voice Shopping is the natural evolution of our conversational commerce work, and our goal is to leverage the power of the native app and natural language to support low friction, hands-free shopping, as well as access to Walmart services,” added Dominique Essig, vice president, Conversational Commerce and Replenishment.

Lawrence Lin Murata, CEO and co-founder of Slope, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster on Tuesday (Oct. 10) about his plans to leverage GPT for business payments, an “audacious” quest that has led to interest and an investment from Sam Altman, the CEO of AI industry pioneer OpenAI.

Industry Innovations

Also this week, Swedish payments company Klarna on Wednesday debuted an AI-powered shopping tool with the help of OpenAI that lets customers shop by taking a photo of merchandise they like.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that there’s a desire among consumers for technology like this, according to research from the report “How Connected Devices Enable Multitasking Among Digital-First Consumers.”

On Tuesday, Trade Ledger opened up the beta program for its AI-enabled Working Capital Copilot solution meant to help banks access the $120 trillion embedded lending market for working capital finance.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that AI is taking center stage in the banking and financial services world. From enhancing customer journeys to fortifying against threats, the technology is shaking up the sector, according to “AI and Banking’s New Dawn: From Conversations to Conversions,” a PYMNTS and Galileo collaboration.

Fake Content Is Getting Real

Generative AI is increasingly making it difficult to determine what is authentic and what is not. In a bid to solve this problem, Adobe and other companies including Arm, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic have established a symbol that can be attached to content alongside metadata, listing its provenance, including whether it was made with AI tools.

The move comes as social media companies and other online platforms face increasing scrutiny and pressure around their ability to police and flag inappropriate uses of AI-generated content, which for the most part continues to spread across the web unchecked.

On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) sent a stern letter to Elon Musk, warning the tech billionaire about the spread of misinformation on his social media site X, formerly known as Twitter.

Also on Tuesday, Meta’s Oversight Board announced it was opening a case to examine whether the social media giant’s existing guidelines on modified content could “withstand current and future challenges” posed by AI. The investigation is the first of its kind, and comes as U.S. lawmakers press the platform over its ability to contain misinformation in advance of the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

AI Looks to Move the Needle in Healthcare

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, the generative AI healthcare market is projected to reach $22 billion by 2032, offering a number of possibilities for better patient care, diagnosis accuracy, and treatment outcomes.

And firms are already to bring innovative solutions to market.

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled artificial AI-powered products to help doctors glean insights from healthcare data, following a similar debut from rival Google which on Monday debuted its own AI-powered Vertex AI Search which allows users to find accurate clinical information much more efficiently, and to search a broad spectrum of data from clinical sources — helping doctors learn a patient’s history without reviewing their own notes or other health records separately.

On Monday (Oct. 9), NextGen Healthcare launched an AI solution designed to interpret patient-provider conversations in real time, providing summarized appointments and documenting care plans. The solution delivers AI-generated subjective, objective, assessment and plan (SOAP) notes directly into the electronic health record (EHR), boosting provider efficiency and improving patient care.

This, as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) held a roundtable discussion on Friday (Oct. 6) that highlighted the Biden-Harris Administration’s priorities to “develop and deploy” advanced AI tools that benefit the health and wellbeing of all Americans.

Still, the latest PYMNTS Intelligence finds that 6 in 10 Americans are uncomfortable with a provider relying on AI in their healthcare (60%), while just under that amount believe that using AI to diagnose diseases and suggest treatments would harm the patient-provider relationship (57%).