What is generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that produces new content, such as text, images, audio or code, in response to a prompt, based on patterns learned from large amounts of existing material.
Older software mostly sorted, calculated or retrieved things that already existed. Generative AI makes something new each time: a draft email, a summary of a long call, a first pass at a job description. Tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Claude are the familiar faces, but the same capability now sits inside many products you may already pay for.
It is strong at first drafts, rewording, summarizing and pulling structure out of messy notes. It is weak at facts it has not been given, exact arithmetic and knowing when it is wrong. That pattern shapes how to use it: give it your own source material, ask for a draft, and have a person who knows the subject review before anything leaves the building.
The business question is rarely whether generative AI works. It is which recurring writing or reading task costs your team the most hours, and whether a draft-plus-review approach would cut that time without raising the error rate. Measure time per task and how much editing each draft needs. If editing takes as long as writing, the use case is not ready.
Example
For example, a lawn care and snow removal company's estimator could dictate notes after a site walk and have a generative AI tool turn them into a clean scope description for the proposal. The estimator still sets quantities and prices, then reads the description before it goes to the client. The illustrative measure is hours from site visit to sent proposal.