The impact will be comparable to that of the PC, the mobile phone or the internet - that's what Bill Gates says about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). And the speed at which the technology is being adopted by users following the release of Chat GPT is breathtaking in comparison. This makes it all the more important for companies to quickly address the potential, challenges and risks of this form of AI. REWE digital's innovation department has initiated the GenAI project, which bundles all of these topics across the Group.
"Like other companies, we are faced with the challenge of analysing the opportunities and risks that GenAI opens up and developing solutions that offer our customers and colleagues real added value. In doing so, we have to keep up the pace. We are travelling at 180 km/h on the motorway here and must maintain this speed," says our Board Member for Digital and Technology, Christoph Eltze. "That is the clear mandate we have given the project team."
This means that employees need confidence in using GenAI, clarity about which applications can and may be used for which purpose and guidance on how best to use them. Customers, on the other hand, need to be sure that data is only anonymised, used to improve the shopping experience and stored in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation.
Julian Mennenöh
"Our colleagues want to know: Can we get an enterprise version of Chat GPT that we can use without hesitation? What is the legal framework? What is the works council's position on the technology? Who can we contact if we have questions about a use case for GenAI in our department? Do we have a central point where we can get an overview of GenAI applications? We need to provide clear answers to these questions and be pioneers for our colleagues across the Group," says Julian Mennenöh, Head of Analytics, who is leading the project together with Henrike Alfeis, Manager Innovation at REWE digital, Lennart Ehritt, Team Lead Digital Strategy at Strategy Retail Germany, and Torsten Saalwächter, Senior Manager Strategy Retail Germany.
In the project, one team is working on the technical requirements for the secure use of GenAI. Other teams are collecting group-wide use cases and examining the legal framework - always with the aim of creating synergies for cross-company collaboration. Initial pilot projects are already underway, including a test phase for a company version of ChatGPT for employees and the development of assistance systems for customers.
Henrike Alfeis
"We want to create a test and learning environment for the REWE Group in which we can build up expertise by constantly engaging with new AI technologies. At the same time, it is important to observe the legal framework without losing speed in further development. The aim is to build up a team of technical enablers who, together with suitable training formats, will make our colleagues fit for these future-oriented applications," says Henrike Alfeis.
The abbreviation "GenAI" stands for generative artificial intelligence. This is a sub-discipline of artificial intelligence. It is characterised by the fact that it is able to generate new content - such as text or images. In the field of images in particular, some deceptively real images generated by AI, such as the Pope in a white down jacket, have shown the opportunities that GenAI offers.
However, these opportunities also point to the risks. In addition to supposedly "real" photos, outdated training data or illogical questions from users can lead to untrue, "hallucinated" outputs.
Basically, freely available GenAI applications such as ChatGPT train with the data that users enter. For companies, this means that all content entered in the work environment is publicly accessible and no longer secure.
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So in Austria we don't drive 180 on the motorway ...