It’s the ‘Year of AI’ and robots may be coming for your job. Accenture’s Chicago innovation center shows businesses the way.

The dawn of 2024 is already being billed as the “Year of AI,” when a transformative technology may begin to turn computers into co-workers, tackling everything from legal contracts to ad campaigns. Some tout artificial intelligence as a productivity-enhancing tool that will eliminate drudgery and open the door to creativity and innovation across all industries. Others envision a job-killing dystopian future where a robot becomes the new regional sales manager. The commercial reality of generative AI — employing computers that “think” and communicate like humans — remains to be seen, but companies large and small are exploring rapidly evolving applications of the new technology. In November, consulting firm Accenture launched an AI innovation studio at its Chicago offices to show businesses how to make it work. “We are building a lot of industry-specific solutions that our clients can actually use,” said Arnab Chakraborty, 50, the Chicago-based senior managing director of artificial intelligence at Accenture. “Gen AI is a buzzword. How do you make it real in the context of applying it to business.” Machines that learn are coming for at least some of our jobs, making inroads in everything from marketing to manufacturing, with one-third of companies regularly employing some form of generative AI, according to a recent McKinsey study. That number is expected to explode in the coming years as companies invest billions in the nascent technology, looking to gear up for a brave new world where generative AI promises dramatic improvements in productivity for early adopters, and threatens to leave Luddites in the dust. “Companies have no choice but to go all in,” said Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at investment firm Wedbush Securities. “Because if you sit back and say this is hype while your competitors are 110% in, next thing you know, you could be the next typewriter company.” The future has already arrived at scores of McDonald’s drive-thrus, for example, where artificial intelligence programs are taking Big Mac orders, and even asking if you want fries with that. Down the road, robots may be making the meals as well, Ives said. Generative AI represents a quantum leap in artificial intelligence, harnessing computers into a neural network that, like the human mind, learns as it processes data, enabling it to create new content. The applications are potentially limitless, a source of both optimism and fear as the commercialization of AI takes off. “It’s the start of a fourth industrial revolution,” Ives said. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, a free online language model created by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, turned the technology from science fiction into reality for millions of users, ushering in a new era — and an AI arms race, Ives said. While Big Tech players such as Microsoft and Google are rushing to incorporate and monetize generative AI, companies across a full spectrum of industries are also finding new applications to streamline their businesses. “By the end of the year, 50 to 60% of companies will be deploying and implementing AI for employees and customers on an everyday basis,” Ives said. Accenture, the Dublin, Ireland-based global consulting giant, is investing $3 billion over the next three years and doubling its AI staff to 80,000 employees to help business clients leverage the potentially game-changing technology. Chicago is at the center of those efforts. The company, which has 743,000 employees in 120 countries, recently launched Gen AI Studios at six locations, including its new Chicago headquarters at Accenture Tower in the West Loop. The innovation spaces offer clients an opportunity to explore generative AI applications that will “reinvent their business” in the coming years, the company said. “It could be a consumer goods client, a bank or insurance company,” Chakraborty said. “We are helping them understand what that business transformation looks like. Right now, the narrative is focused on cost savings, productivity efficiency gains, but also on new innovations.” Chakraborty, a 25-year veteran of advanced analytics and an AI thought leader, said generative AI is rapidly evolving from experimentation to scaled implementation in 2024, and will be the biggest tech trend over the next decade, generating up to $5 trillion in annual economic impact worldwide. Accenture relocated its Chicago office last year to seven extensively renovated floors of the Helmut Jahn-designed high-rise above the Ogilvie Transportation Center, which now bears the company’s name. At the heart of the 264,000-square-foot space, the technology innovation hub sits behind a wall of glass, glowing with purple lights and an array of interactive displays, beckoning like a generative AI arcade. The Chicago studio focuses on applications for financial services, health, life sciences, consumer goods and manufacturing industries. Inside, hands-on AI stations enable clients to see the technology at work in a variety of applications, from customer service and marketing to hammering out legal contracts. “AI is all about empowering the human beings to do their jobs,” Chakraborty said. “It will help automate some of the boring jobs.” One application, Machine Creative Studio, develops advertising campaigns from scratch. Accenture is working with a large Chicago-based consumer goods company to integrate the technology, helping it save time and money to find some marketing magic. From campaign slogans to images to social media hashtags, the machine takes cues and prompts to instantly create original advertising concepts. Think of an android Don Draper from “Mad Men” firing off pitches at light speed, pivoting seamlessly with every new suggestion. “This isn’t a final product,” said Kristy Kindinger, client innovation manager at Accenture. “But this has allowed us to have creative conversations along the way around our decision-making.” Another application, Contract Builder, helps companies create and revise a legal agreement — an often time-consuming and expensive process — before lawyers start running their meters. The robot attorney pulls together all the details, walks through the process step-by-step and structures the contract to avoid ambiguity, potentially eliminating some of the back-and-forth legal haggling that often accompanies finalizing an agreement, Kindinger said. While it doesn’t obviate the need for corporate lawyers, it could make a substantial dent in their billable hours. “We’re seeing it as those individuals have more time to do more high-value work,” Kindinger said. “This is not a replace, and there’s still time and energy here for reviewing.” Over the last 10 months, Accenture has built more than 300 applications with generative AI for use both within the company and for its clients, Chakraborty said. One of those clients is Chicago-based McDonald’s, which announced in December it had expanded its partnership with Accenture to help apply generative AI solutions across its restaurants worldwide. The program is aimed at accelerating automation, reducing complexity for the restaurant crew and serving hotter, fresher food to customers. At an investor update in December, Brian Rice, McDonald’s chief information officer, unveiled a new initiative, “Digitizing the Arches,” which will be driven in part by generative AI. “McDonald’s has been an early adopter and pioneer in the use of AI,” Rice said at the investor update, which is posted online. “For example, voice ordering is deployed in nearly 100 drive-thrus across the U.S.” Some social media posters have recounted difficult experiences with AI orders at McDonald’s, where miscommunication resulted in incorrect items. But as the technology improves, AI experts say robots are more likely to get the orders right than human employees. In fact, a bigger worry may be that AI gets so good at its job that human employees are unnecessary. Learning how to work with AI, however, could be a good career move, Ives said. “Longer term, there will be replacements and attrition,” Ives said. “But in the near term, we actually think AI is a huge job creator for engineers, developers.” The short term may not be so rosy for some human employees either. A November study commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com found that 44% of companies using AI believe it will lead to layoffs in 2024. The future was on display at the annual Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas, where AI-powered robots ably performed as baristas, whipping up lattes and stirring concerns among hospitality workers that their jobs were on the way out. The robot baristas came to Vegas just months after the Culinary Workers Union negotiated new five-year labor contracts with a dozen casinos on the strip, averting a strike. The union’s bargaining power may be reduced in subsequent negotiations as AI-powered hospitality technology continues to evolve. “Technology was a strike issue and one of the very last issues to be resolved,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, who led negotiation efforts with the casinos. Another pressing concern, at least in some quarters, is that as generative AI evolves, it may portend a “Matrix”-like future, where machines not only do all the work, but spread disinformation, impersonate people and, ultimately, rule the world. The Center for Humane Technology, a California-based nonprofit organization, is sounding the alarm that the speed of AI’s evolution and deployment, and its unpredictable emergent capabilities, make it an existential threat to society. In a 2023 video presentation posted online, co-founders Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin cite a study that found half of AI researchers polled believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans will become extinct due to the inability to control AI. While not professing to have the answers, Harris suggested a good place to start would be to “selectively slow down” the public rollout of large language model AI applications until the proper safety guardrails are in place. “This is not about stopping the research. This is not about not building AI,” Harris said in the presentation. “It’s about slowing down the public deployment.” Fears that OpenAI was moving too quickly with the public launch of ChatGPT may have led to the brief November board ouster of CEO Sam Altman, who was quickly reinstated after threats of a mass exodus by employees. Responsible AI development nonetheless remains a core issue within the industry. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in October mandating the “safe, secure and trustworthy” development and use of artificial intelligence to mitigate “substantial risks” during its rapid rollout. In November, Chakraborty participated in the third AI Insight Forum in Washington, a series of discussions organized by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., aimed at developing regulations for the rapidly evolving technology. “Part of my testimony was about demystifying the fears of AI, grounded in facts,” Chakraborty said. “There are parts of the job that will get automated and parts of the job that will augment the human, and how you need to prepare your workforce as a result of that.” Like the space race during the 1960s, the development of AI is an international competition, with China the biggest global competitor to the U.S., Ives said. But as far as AI’s impact, Ives likens it to another decade, during the dawn of the internet in 1995, when AOL and dial-up modems ushered in the digital age. “We view AI as the biggest tech transformation in 30 years,” Ives said. “In the next 12 to 18 months, ‘guac or no guac’ at Chipotle could be from a nonhuman — who both takes the order and makes it. It’s going to be a zero-to-60 in three seconds type of feel.” The Associated Press contributed.