Despite its recent virality, generative AI is not an entirely new concept but rather an evolution of the first natural language processing-based chatbot that was created in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT. While AI technology has crept forward inch by inch over the last several decades—popularized by household digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa—we’re in a period of exponential growth that will inevitably reshape how we do business.