The ChatGPT chatbot promises to change enterprise communications, both internally and with customers.
Seemingly overnight, with OpenAI’s December 2022 release of the ChatGPT chatbot, the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from niche to mainstream use. Any enterprise leaders who haven’t taken notice need to –– this will be a transformational technology for businesses.
As I explained in a research brief, ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) trained on conversational text to generate human-like responses to any question imaginable in a matter of seconds and ask follow-up questions as needed. These answers can be long, like a detailed business proposal, or short, like an email. In releasing a free version of ChatGPT, OpenAI opened the doors for widespread experimentation using this powerful technology, known as generative AI.
LLMs are not the exclusive province of OpenAI, but the organization gets credit for bringing awareness to the masses. Earlier this month OpenAI released the fourth iteration of its general LLM, GPT-4, with the claim that internal evaluations have shown it to be “82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5.”
For enterprises, the real transformative power of generative AI comes when these models can be trained using internal business data. In theory, enabling employees to use generative AI in their workstreams will lead to big boosts in productivity while also positively impacting employee experience. This theory posits that generative AI will take away the drudge work, leaving them time to focus on more fulfilling creative or business-generating tasks, for example.