Generative AI is reshaping industries from retail to healthcare by boosting productivity and cutting costs. Discover how this powerful tech is already driving real business value and how you can harness it for your organization.
Generative AI (GenAI) is something many of us interact with every day, often without even realizing it. From asking ChatGPT to summarize a report to seeing AI-generated answers at the top of your Google search results, this technology is quietly transforming how we work, search, and create.
One recent example that made the headlines: ChatGPT’s ability to generate visuals in the distinctive style of Studio Ghibli, the renowned Japanese animation studio. That kind of creative output, once thought to be uniquely human, is now within reach of advanced AI models.
These models aren’t just impressive, they’re signals of a much larger shift. In this blog, we’ll explore how GenAI is being used in the real world today and what it means for businesses at large.
Understanding Generative AI and the Economic Impact
GenAI is capable of producing unique content (text or images) by drawing on information from various sources. It uses advanced machine learning algorithms and neural networks to recognize patterns and build models. Powered by the user’s initial prompt, it creatively builds upon a store of data to generate relevant and original output.
While it falls under the broader umbrella of AI, it differs from traditional AI systems that primarily focus on analyzing, classifying, and predicting outcomes based on structured data. GenAI extends beyond these functions by assisting with content creation and enhancing decision-making with dynamic, human-like generation capabilities.
For example, if you’re analyzing diversity trends across business school programs, traditional AI can sift through years of enrollment data to highlight shifts and emerging patterns. GenAI, on the other hand, goes a step further. It can help you craft a compelling Statement of Purpose by suggesting structure, refining tone, and highlighting talking points tailored to your background, all based on a simple prompt.
Gartner suggests that by 2026, over 100 million people might be collaborating with GenAI to complete their work. It is not just a trend; it is rapidly becoming mainstream technology that augments business processes, drives innovation across sectors, and creates disruptive opportunities for both revenue generation and cost reduction.
GenAI is transforming various industries, and if its practical applications are widely implemented, it could significantly boost the global economy. According to a McKinsey report that examined more than 60 real-world AI applications, full implementation could potentially unlock between $2 trillion and $4 trillion in value for the global economy.
Practical Use Cases of Generative AI
GenAI is a technology with a wide range of practical applications. These use cases can be grouped in several ways: by desired business outcomes, industry sectors, and specific business functions.
Organizations are already exploring GenAI to reduce operational costs, improve product and service quality, boost employee productivity, and enhance risk management. Its applications span industries such as retail, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing. It also supports core business functions including IT, finance, legal, marketing, customer service, and operations.
Use cases can further be divided by audience—those designed for end users, like consumers, and those designed for enterprises, such as tools that automate workflows or assist with content generation at scale.
In this blog, we’ll explore industry-specific examples that illustrate how GenAI is delivering value to both individuals and organizations, highlight its growing role in shaping the future of work and business.
Retail
As consumers, we’re already engaging with AI during everyday interactions on eCommerce platforms. Think about the product recommendations you see based on your browsing or purchase history—those are powered by AI. Over time, these suggestions have become increasingly personalized, factoring in preferences like brand, price range, customer ratings, and more. Similarly, AI-powered chatbots have become the first line of support for resolving customer issues.
Practical Use Cases
- Product Listings: GenAI can automatically generate product descriptions, feature highlights, and even summarize customer reviews by pulling from structured product data and unstructured content. This accelerates time-to-market, builds consistency across listings, and reduces the manual workload for content teams while helping shoppers make more informed decisions.
- Personalization: GenAI can recommend products based on customer preferences and browsing behavior, which enhances the overall customer experience. It can also be used for virtual try-ons to help customers visualize products before purchasing.
- Dynamic Pricing: Demand, popularity, expiration dates, available stock, location, and other factors can be considered by AI models to suggest dynamic pricing strategies, which in turn can improve inventory management.
- Query Resolution: Customer inquiries, frequently asked questions, billing-related concerns, and more can be addressed by AI-powered chatbots, reducing response time and improving the customer experience.
- Supply Chain Management: AI can monitor inventory and help reduce waste. It can also increase efficiency by tracking inventory movement, sales trends, and storage requirements.
Healthcare
From streamlining medical documentation to improving diagnostics, resolving patient queries, and accelerating insurance claims, GenAI has the potential to transform every stage of the healthcare and life sciences value chain.
Practical Use Cases
- Preventive Care: GenAI can enhance medical imaging, augment reports from X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans, and reconstruct missing or low-quality data to detect patterns and abnormalities. This supports early diagnosis, improved tracking of disease progression, and more proactive interventions. For more on this topic, here’s an article.
- Personalized Treatment Plans: By analyzing electronic health records, genetic information, and historical outcomes, GenAI can help build a comprehensive patient profile. Providers can then use this insight to recommend personalized therapies, which improves effectiveness while reducing trial-and-error in treatment.
- Drug Discovery: GenAI accelerates the drug development process by predicting molecular structures, identifying promising compounds, and simulating interactions. This can significantly reduce time and costs in research and development, making treatments more accessible and affordable.
- Automated Note-Taking and Reminders: GenAI tools can assist patient, especially those with cognitive challenges, by transcribing clinical visits, setting reminders for medications, and prompting routine check-ups and prescription refills.
- Clinical Trials: GenAI can support trail design by simulating diverse patient populations, generating synthetic data to model trial outcomes, and drafting tailored trial protocols. It can also analyze large volumes of medical literature and clinical data to suggest eligibility criteria, optimize patient recruitment strategies, and predict potential risks, leading to more efficient, cost-effective, and targeted trials.
- Agent Assist for Payers: For health insurers, GenAI can support call center agents by analyzing transcripts, summarizing interactions, and identifying issues in real time. It can also assist in processing claims, flagging anomalies, and detecting potential fraud.
Financial Services
AI-driven automation and decision-making are transforming financial services by streamlining operations, improving accuracy, and enhancing both customer and enterprise experiences. From fraud detection to personalized financial advice, GenAI offers practical solutions across the value chain.
Practical Use Cases
- Advisory Services: AI-powered chatbots can simplify complex financial queries for both internal teams and customers by delivering conversational, context-aware responses. GenAI can also support portfolio advisory by analyzing market trends, financial goals, and individual transaction histories to offer personalized investment recommendations.
- Documentation Support: GenAI can significantly reduce the time spent on creating and reviewing critical documents. It can help draft investment policies, loan applications, compliance communications, client correspondence, and more.
- Fraud Detection: GenAI can simulate complex fraud scenarios to help train and strengthen detection systems. By generating synthetic transaction data that mimics real-world fraudulent behavior, it enhances the accuracy and anomaly detection models. GenAI can also draft suspicious activity reports (SARs) and summarize complex case data for compliance teams, which drives faster investigations. More on this here.
- Business Process Automation: New tools for improved wealth management and investment advisory services can be developed using GenAI. By leveraging OCR and NLP, AI-powered systems can extract key financial data, cross-reference it from various sources, and assist in evaluating institutional investments, brokerage clients, stock screening, and more.
Manufacturing
GenAI, when built on a strong data foundation, can transform a legacy manufacturing facility into a smart one by streamlining operations to accelerate peak performance. This leads to increased efficiency, enhanced productivity, and greater revenue for the business.
Practical Use Cases
- Supply Chain Optimization: Using real-time data analytics and predictive capabilities, GenAI can optimize the various aspects of a supply chain. For example, it can help maintain optimal inventory levels based on real-time demand, reducing waste. It can also help improve space utilization by analyzing storage requirements, usage patterns, and material flow.
- Maintenance Assistance: AI-powered conversational agents trained on product manuals and troubleshooting guides can help on-site workers in diagnosing equipment issues. This support helps minimize downtime.
- Predictive Maintenance: GenAI can analyze historical performance data and previous maintenance actions to predict potential equipment failures. It can also suggest repair parts and provide real-time diagnostics to prevent costly disruptions.
- Design Optimization: GenAI can help manufacturers in exploring design options that are cost-effective, functionally efficient, and accurate. These designs aim to reduce disruptions and enhance overall performance and productivity.
Technology
Among all industries adopting GenAI, the technology sector is seeing some of the most immediate and impactful applications. As businesses increasingly depend on technology to accelerate and scale operations, GenAI is emerging as a valuable tool for enhancing software development, optimizing system performance, and accelerating product innovation.
Practical Use Cases
- Enterprise Knowledge Management: AI-powered agents can provide real-time responses and coaching tailored to the specific needs of an organization. They can function as dynamic knowledge libraries, offering access to training materials, best practices, and critical information. This helps employees stay up to date with product enhancements, policy updates, and other enterprise-wide communications and training initiatives.
- Automation and Productivity: GenAI can reduce technical debt caused by time constraints and human error. It can automate code reviews and testing, make minor code edits without disrupting functionality, and identify and prioritize critical issues, freeing up developers to focus on more strategic tasks and improving overall team productivity. For more information, read this article.
- New Product Development: GenAI tools can generate functions and applications from natural language prompts, accelerating development and reducing the need for manual coding. These tools can also recommend improvements, suggest optimal system architecture and UI/UX layouts based on product usage patterns, generate mock-ups, and streamline the design phase.
- Product Lifecycle Management: GenAI is improving every stage of a product lifecycle, from ideation to retirement. It expedites data-driven decision-making by analyzing market trends and historical data. Using natural language processing, it can evaluate customer feedback, stakeholder inputs, and historical data. GenAI can explore design solutions and feature enhancements while factoring in technical feasibility and regulatory standards.
How to Leverage Generative AI
To unlock the value of AI, you need more than just tools—you need a partner who knows how to deliver measurable value.
Concord brings deep expertise in data-driven strategy to help you evaluate pilot results, understand AI’s business impact, and assess feasibility, compliance, and long-term scalability. Together, we’ll identify where Ai can drive real outcomes for your organization.
Let’s start with a customized AI Journey Workshop. We’ll focus on creating tangible business value, building a practical implementation roadmap, and enabling new capabilities that set you apart.
AI may be full of hype, but with the right partner, it can deliver real results. Concord helps you close the gap between promise and performance.
