Generative AI
Generative AI is a category of AI that produces new content — text, images, code, data — rather than simply classifying or predicting from existing inputs. It is the technology behind large language models, image generators, and code assistants.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI refers to AI systems that create new outputs rather than just analysing or classifying existing data. Ask a generative model to write a supplier email, summarise a contract, extract fields from a PDF, or draft an exception report — it generates the content from scratch, drawing on patterns learned during training.
This distinguishes it from earlier discriminative AI, which was trained to categorise or predict: is this invoice fraudulent or not? Is this shipment on time or delayed? Generative models can do both — they can classify, and they can explain, draft, and produce. This breadth is what makes them useful across so many operational tasks.
What Generative AI Can and Cannot Do
It is worth being clear about the boundaries:
Can do: Write, summarise, extract, translate, classify, explain, generate structured data from unstructured inputs, answer questions about documents, draft responses.
Cannot do reliably without guardrails: Guarantee factual accuracy, access real-time data, perform complex arithmetic without verification, or operate inside your systems without integration work.
The failure mode is treating generative AI as a magic oracle. It is a capable text processor that needs to be grounded in real data, connected to real systems, and checked at the right points.
Generative AI in Operations
The highest-value operational applications of generative AI are not the flashy ones. They are the unglamorous, high-volume tasks that currently require a person to read something and type something: extracting line items from invoices and writing them to ERP fields, drafting purchase order amendments when a supplier ships a partial order, summarising exception queues for a daily management review. These tasks are repetitive, document-heavy, and expensive to do manually at scale. That is where generative AI delivers measurable returns — not in generating creative content, but in automating the reading and writing work that sits between your documents and your systems.