Generative AI.
AI that creates new content — text, images, code — rather than just classifying or predicting. The category includes ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, and the AI features showing up in every business tool.
In plain English
Generative AI is AI that creates new content. The category includes text generation (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), image generation (Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion), code generation (GitHub Copilot, Cursor), and increasingly audio and video. The "generative" part is the difference from classification AI, which just categorises existing content.
For SMB business use, the text-generation flavour is where most real value lives. Drafting personalised replies. Summarising long documents. Generating reports and analyses. Writing draft content (proposals, contracts, marketing copy) that humans polish. Translating. Explaining technical content to non-technical audiences.
What generative AI is great at: handling variability, drafting first versions, processing language at speed. What it's bad at without help: accuracy on specific facts, current information (training cutoffs apply), maths on long numbers, certainty (it can confidently produce wrong outputs).
The production pattern that works for SMBs: generative AI drafts, humans review. The AI handles the volume; the human handles the quality control. This works in customer comms (AI drafts reply; human approves before send), content production (AI drafts blog post; human edits and adds expertise), and document processing (AI generates a summary; human verifies before action).
Where generative AI is overhyped for SMBs: replacing creative work, replacing strategic decisions, replacing customer relationships. It augments the people who do those things; it doesn't replace them.
Real examples
What this looks like in practice.
- Drafting personalised first-touch replies to customer enquiries — AI writes, human approves.
- Summarising contract packs to flag clauses needing review.
- Generating draft quotes from extracted drawing data.
- Producing weekly operational summaries for management — narrative around the numbers, automatically.
See in action
Where we deliver this for clients.
Related terms
Adjacent concepts.
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