Generative AI is having its moment right now. It’s in the news for how students are using it in school, users are self-diagnosing medical issues, private data is getting uploaded, and more.

Even people like me—curious minds with too much time on our hands—are testing its capabilities and seeing where it falls short.

But tools like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, which are now in the hands of the masses, have opened up possibilities that were previously relegated to small teams at the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Generative AI is now accessible by just about everyone, including industrial enterprises. Before this year, many enterprises had to build home-grown AI solutions and/or shell out big sums for AI tech—facts that left AI out of reach for smaller companies.

Geir Engdahl, CTO of Cognite, a software company specializing in asset-heavy industries, says ChatGPT is making AI simple for the masses—comparing the shift to how the iPhone made mobile technology accessible to even the least tech-savvy user.

Engdahl isn’t talking about using generative AI for writing fart jokes (at least not that he discusses publicly). He sees its use in industrial applications where previous barriers like lack of coding skills or limited access to big data can be overcome to help make complex industrial data more simple and therefore more usable.

According to itself, generative AI could impact a lot of areas of industrial enterprises: