My first job was at a bank, doing the nightshift during my first year at university, and it was an important job. I, along with six other students, was responsible for removing the staples from credit card receipts before they went into the sorting machines. Staples played havoc if they got into the sorting machine, like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie (ok, I’m pushing that one a little far 😉). I was so good at removing staples that I got moved up to encoding the receipts so they could be machine read, processed, scanned, and then captured on microfiche for safe storage/audit purposes. That was 25 years ago, and interestingly none of the jobs I ended up doing during those first five years in the working world are still done by humans today. I know this because that same bank is now our client. One of the major drivers for investing in and innovating with technology is to allow people to focus on higher impact work.
Automation has been around for decades and has become very sophisticated given the advancements in machine learning, decisioning, and workflow automation. Gen AI presents a new horizon, a horizon where large language models (LLMs) don’t have the same limitation as the AI models from the past. Previously, there were different AI models for text, speech recognition, decisioning, robotics, and image creation, where these models worked in isolation and were treated as separate disciplines. They were all also analytical in nature. Gen AI adds the ability to create new text, images, sounds, and more. It allows us to weave together other forms of AI and automation in profoundly new ways. The walls have come down, so we can expect innovation to pick up pace, which we’re already starting to see. My experience over the last 25 years when it comes to change could be less than five years for the current generation. And this may even be a conservative estimate when you consider the differences between GPT3 and GPT4 (and GPT5, which is coming) and the time between them.
Today, Gen AI can generate well-constructed essays in seconds, produce brilliant one-of-a-kind pieces of art in minutes, and create loan processing applications for Turkish speakers faster than you can cook a western omelette (if you haven’t seen this last one, it’s really worth a look). This genie will not and should not go back in the bottle. Gen AI is here to stay, bringing with it enormous impact and opportunity for businesses to improve how they operate and serve their customers. Of course, the flip side is that it comes with significant risk, requiring ethical and responsible use and guardrails to avoid misinformation and bias, and to respect privacy and security. So as technology leaders, we have a duty of care to use it in a productive and safe way.
Having spent an incredible three days at PegaWorld Inspire in June and witnessing the innovations in Pega Infinity ’23, I cannot wait for our clients to experience the power of the Pega Platform™ with Pega GenAI™. Based on everything I’ve learned over my career and where I think these new capabilities will take us, I think it’s the right first step for embracing Gen AI – helping businesses be more efficient and helping customers have better experiences. We’ve also learned that new innovations need structure to take hold – water has power when you channel it through a dam. This is why I am certain the combination of Gen AI and the Pega Platform architecture will be so impactful.
For 40 years, Pega has been helping clients start building for change and infusing Gen AI into the platform as a natural progression, while being an accelerant to our mission of changing the way the world builds software. These new capabilities, which will ship with Infinity ’23, eliminate routine developer tasks and free up time to focus on strategic and experience-related aspects of what end users need, while making it faster and easier to adapt as our clients’ businesses evolve and change. There’s a serious and important point in our omelette example: Gen AI accelerates the application build by generating stages, steps, data models, and test data in seconds rather than days or even weeks. And because of Pega’s Center-out® architecture, you get omni-channel automatically, removing the need for code in your channels altogether. Here’s the link again to the video in case you forgot to click on it the last time 😉.
Use the latest Pega version, ideally on Pega Cloud
We never stop improving our platform, which is why Pega is considered the gold standard for low-code AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. Staying current is a must if you want to stay ahead of your competition and delight your end users, and you get all this while secure in the knowledge that the platform has been architected to scale beyond your needs, be reliable, and to make it easy to change applications as your business requires. This is even more true in the rapidly evolving world of new AI models and governance models to support them, which is why Pega GenAI is only available on Pega Cloud®. If you’re not already on Pega Cloud, now is a great time to plan the move – and we are committed to making this a seamless experience.
Use App Studio and Next-Best-Action Designer
Our studios deliver a prescriptive authoring experience that houses the DNA of your Pega application, and are the starting point for getting the benefits of Constellation, GenAI, enterprise reuse, omni-channel out of the box, and much more. These capabilities will help you accelerate the app build and deployment as well as maintain experience.
Learn about modern modular enterprise reuse
Clients are getting to market 2–3X faster when leveraging reusable low-code components. Modular enterprise reuse harnesses all the power of App Studio and Dev Studio and provides in the moment guidance for creating more modular, agile Pega applications. Take the new Modular Enterprise Reuse Foundation Mission course on Pega Academy to get started.
Embrace Pega Express
Pega Express best practices help you create value through rapid innovation and build business capabilities better and quicker. It’s a way to ensure business and IT work together collaboratively. It’s not magic – just simple, practical tips that when combined, make a big impact.
Get help from Pega and our partners
Even with the best tech, you still need the right people and processes to see maximum ROI. Pega consultants and our partners have the domain and industry expertise to make sure you are ready to take full advantage of Pega and GenAI. Having a Program Architect and Technical Account Manager on your team shortens the learning curve and accelerates results.
Consider Pega’s innovation factory
Pega’s low-code innovation factory is a proven operating model for realizing the promise of an autonomous enterprise. It incorporates guidance from Gartner, Forrester, and the Project Management Institute, as well as the real-world experience of Pega clients like Google, Navy Federal Credit Union, Deutsche Bahn, and LeasePlan.
A low-code innovation factory includes unified intake for automation requests and distributed delivery to solve development problems of any scale – from low to high complexity, governance to encourage innovation while mitigating risk, enterprise reuse to build reusable components that create consistent experiences and accelerate application delivery, and continuous optimization by leveraging the great features of Pega Infinity ‘23.
Our team of dedicated architects will help build this agility into your organization to get your innovation factory humming. Reach out to your Account Executive to learn more about Pega’s low-code innovation factory.
So over to you – what do you think? What obstacles do you see in embracing GenAI? How can Pega partner with you to navigate the road ahead? Where can Pega help you overcome obstacles, and do you have any feedback on how we can work together as we enter this new dawn of innovation?