NEW YORK - Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has received a lot of business attention recently, thanks mostly to the widespread availability of ChatGPT. If one cuts through the hype and looks at the reality, the business value of GenAI is leaving many people disappointed - at least in the short term.

Global research firm Gartner has identified GenAI as being at the peak of inflated expectations, a location on the firm’s 2023 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Gartner says its hype cycle provides “a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.”

With GenAI landing in this stage of the hype cycle, many businesses should expect to soon move to the next phase - where they become disappointed and disillusioned at what they perceive to be a shortfall compared with what they expected from the tech’s promise.

According to Gartner, the hype cycle comprises five phases of a tech’s life cycle:

- Innovation trigger: A potential tech breakthrough is announced, with early proof-of-concept stories and media interest generating significant publicity. 

- Peak of inflated expectations: Early publicity produces some success stories, often accompanied by many failures. Some companies act, but many others do not.

- Trough of disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver, while producers of the tech shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

- Slope of enlightenment: More examples of how the tech can benefit the enterprise start to become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from tech providers, and m

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