Uses and impact

AI is used by a variety of applications, platforms and systems. With some of these it will be clear that when you engage with them, you are using AI. With others, AI's involvement is less obvious.

This section helps to understand the role that AI can (and does) play in a variety of tasks and tools, enabling you to spot when it might be being used, take advantage of its capabilities, or ensure that the correct safeguards are in place.

Category
Artificial Intelligence

What can we use AI for?

If you believe the sales pitches, it’s everything. But of course, that’s not true.

For starters, as set out in the What is AI? section, AI is not one thing. It covers a wide range of technologies and research fields. Whilst Deep Learning can help with the analysis of medical scans and detect cancerous growths, and optimisation systems can provide you with the best route to the airport, what most organisations are considering now are generative and agentic AI technologies. Products like ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Claude and Gemini and their associated agentic platforms.

AI could be adopted in organisations through various approaches. In some cases bespoke AI tools might be developed in-house, while others may be procured from external vendors, and in many cases, organisations deploy off-the-shelf publicly available models. Whilst we acknowledge that some membership organisations may well be data mature and infrastructurally sound enough to be considering developing their own AI systems, for this knowledge base, we will focus on the adoption and deployment of existing AI models, specifically generative and agentic AI systems and tools.

In practical terms, these technologies serve two distinct but connected business functions – generating content and carrying out tasks. While the promised potential is significant, it is important to note that the long-term evidence for these benefits is still yet to emerge. Much of the current data comes from early adopters or controlled pilots and the sustainability of claimed efficiency and productivity gains over years of operation are still to be proven.

Generative AI can act as a tool for tasks that require creating content from scratch or synthesising large amounts of information. This could include:

Drafting and editing – producing first drafts of

Register for an account

Create an SGA account and gain access to all our resources and courses.

Already have an account? Log in.