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How AI may become the new offshoring

Companies must find a way to make the most of the new technology

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AI is going to upend everything, everywhere, all at once.

AI is going to upend everything, everywhere, all at once, according to the evangelists.

PHOTO: AFP

John Thornhill

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It took 72 years for the number of US households with a telephone to rise from 10 per cent to 90 per cent. It took 19 years for the adoption of the television to follow the same arc. But the speed of take-up for our latest technologies, such as generative AI, is stunning. Within 15 months of launch, 23 per cent of American adults had used OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

The reasons for this acceleration are not hard to fathom. Rather than being a discrete, relatively expensive, physical object, like a telephone or television, generative AI is (mostly) free software that augments existing services.

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