While innovative GenAI applications seem to be sprouting up everywhere these days, the work of layering GenAI services into bread-and-butter enterprise apps has not hit critical mass yet. However, the impact that GenAI is having on the consumer market will undeniably spill over into traditional enterprises – we’ve all seen the signs, and we know it’s coming. For example, my twelve-year-old daughter is now fully adept at breaking digital hearts with her favorite set of character-based AI chatbots. Is balancing a checkbook a skill she is going to need? Hardly. That will be done by a GenAI assistant that comes with her online bank account.

Compared to the latest wave of consumer-focused apps, which are undoubtedly born in the cloud, the business-critical apps that power traditional enterprise will face a much steeper climb to bring GenAI into the fold. For these massive hybrid platforms, it’s not quite so simple as pushing all your customer data into an LLM and slapping a webapp and a chatbot on top. All sorts of factors will come into play here – data transformation, data loss prevention, compliance, governance, global delivery, fault tolerance, multi-cloud support, and of course, network and application security…