Hollywood writers have emerged from a fractious and extended labour relations crisis with an apparent victory over artificial intelligence: Going forward, the rights of creatives will be protected by constraints around how GenAI can be used in the movie industry. Meanwhile, songwriters are still wringing their hands. CEO Daniel Ek has no immediate plans to ban AI-generated music from Spotify, arguing that enhancing music outputs using AI technologies is fine, but directly impersonating an artist using AI is crossing a line. This drawing of limits has been seized upon by “big tech” companies such as Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI. They’ve tried to jump ahead of the regulators by making voluntary commitments to develop safeguards around generative AI, such as the use of watermarking on different forms of content, so that users can identify when these technologies have been used or not.

A little closer to home, we have witnessed a spate of billion-dollar investments into GenAI by the Big Four and major consulting firms. Most are busily creating new practice areas, developing custom GenAI platforms and large language models, and committing to huge training programmes for their people.

Given all of these swirling forces, it seems somewhat inevitable that the world of professional services thought leadership will be impacted in quite a fundamental way. In December 2023, we explored this issue in depth in a hot topic report for White Space subscribers, Harnessing the Power of GenAI in Professional Services Thought Leadership. This report set out to understand client perceptions of GenAI’s involvement in thought leadership, while also taking a temperature check with thought leadership experts from several leading firms. Based on the findings, will GenAI fundamentally change the nature of thought leadership, and how it is produced and consumed? We think so.

Our data suggests that clients are currently split down the middle with respect to GenAI’s involvement in professional services more broadly, and also in terms of thought leadership specifically. Half the audience appears to view GenAI as a pathway to the sunlit uplands, while the other half remain focused on the associated risks and uncertainty, and bemoan the loss of human-driven output. In amongst these polarised views, however, there is greater consensus on the need for firms to be transparent when using GenAI in their work.

As we might expect, the leading firms are already running hard at GenAI, actively embracing, experimenting, and developing new capabilities and ways of working. The mood is positive and the watchword is augmentation. Our expert contributors from firms including IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, and PA Consulting highlighted some important philosophical and definitional questions that GenAI has provoked, and they were adept at examining GenAI and thought leadership through the Source lenses of differentiation, appeal, resilience, and prompting action. Most believe all four dimensions are already being impacted in a fundamental way. Flipping the orientation to more of a process view, experts were also willing to shine a light on the most valuable use cases for GenAI, spanning right across the development and activation lifecycle for thought leadership.

Back in 1964, the famous futurist and science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, said: “The world of AD 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.” As we begin 2024, it seems highly unlikely that thought leadership will soon become automated into an Asimov-styled future, where highly skilled professionals are doing little more than entering queries into a GenAI platform and hitting a “produce & publish” button. But, given the human tendency to overestimate the power of technology in the short term, and underestimate its effect in the longer term, we may well see some elements of that in the not-too-distant future.

Download an extract of Harnessing the Power of GenAI in Professional Services Thought Leadership.