If 2023–2024 were the years of pilots and prototypes, 2025–2026 will be about orchestration, governance and scale. The signal across serious researchers is consistent: adoption is widespread and business impact concentrates where companies redesign workflows, measure outcomes and hard-wire trust and controls into the stack. McKinsey reports that ~80% of companies use generative AI (GenAI), yet most still aren’t seeing material earnings contribution, because scaling practices and operating models lag the hype. This gap is a roadmap that can be leveraged by Frontier Firms and individuals looking for an advantage (or many) in today’s AI-powered world.
Hollywood provides clues on reasoning based on the storytelling of many films. We can use the analogies in film scenes to show how Large Language Models (LLMs) arrive at conclusions, which are more accurately described as hypotheses.
In R&D, the true power of AI like ChatGPT lies not in clever prompts, but in context engineering: the discipline of shaping and delivering the accurate information from a company’s vast knowledge base so AI can deliver meaningful, domain-specific insights.
Avadhoot Kulkarni, Senior Manager Product Management, shares his journey of starting as a skeptic of GenAI and how he started using it for day-to-day tasks.