By Angela Spencer, Director of Digital Transformation Services, Ensono
Hi F.L.,
I’m so glad you’re approaching the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT from a positive,“How can this help?” angle, especially given the abundance of fear—and fearmongering—surrounding AI technology right now (i.e. “Is this thing going to replace my job?”). The fear is understandable, but to see why it’s misplaced—at least for the time being—it’s helpful to take a step back and consider ChatGPT in a broader context. In the tech community, we tend to overestimate how quickly technology is moving. While the current pace of innovation in AI feels shockingly fast, the reality is that there has been a developed body of research around AI for
70+ years. What we’re experiencing could be summed up as “a 70-year overnight leap” in capability!
ChatGPT is unquestionably a meaningful milestone on the road to the Singularity—the theoretical “point of no return” when AI overtakes human intelligence—but we’re not there yet. And despite some of the more clickbait-y headlines floating around, we probably won’t be for a while.
As it stands today, ChatGPT’s greatest power lies not in the existential threat it poses to knowledge workers’ jobs, but in its potential to make those jobs dramatically easier, more impactful, and ultimately more valuable. Applied thoughtfully, ChatGPT can be a productivity tool on a level previously unimagined, empowering people to:
Make better decisions faster(with a caveat—see #2),
Dramatically increase the volume and quality of content produced, and
Spend more time on high value tasks that require true expertise.
Google and its predecessors (Yahoo!, Lycos, Alta Vista, etc.) gave us the ability to type a few words into a search engine and instantaneously receive a list of resources to peruse—incalculably transforming the act of research and information processing. ChatGPT takes that acceleration a giant leap further. Beyond giving you links to resources, it gives you what you might create after consuming all that content. And ChatGPT goes beyond even that, creating fiction, marketing copy, programming code and more with just a prompt.
The strategic applications and practical implications of this are massive. Any area of your business that requires written content in some form can immediately use and benefit from this technology. Consider the graphic on the right for how ChatGPT could be cross-functionally deployed to help people and teams accomplish far more in less time. To maximize the effectiveness of ChatGPT in your business, those tasked with using it need to do two critical things:
#1) Ask the right question – The quality of ChatGPT’s output rises or falls in direct correlation to the quality of the prompt submitted to it. If you want to get the biggest bang for your AI buck, specificity and precision, as reflected in the examples, are key.
This may mean investing 15–20 minutes developing, submitting and fine-tuning your wording until you receive a response you can work with. Compare that with the 15–20 hours a person might spend getting that result via manual internet research, writing and editing (assuming the human has the authoring skill and context to create such content) and you can start to see the productivity-accelerating potential here.
#2) Edit in truth and humanity – Once you’ve got a solid ChatGPT-produced starting point, the actual work begins. There are some things only a real, live person can bring to any piece of content, the most important being an eye for falsehoods, inaccuracy and bias—all of which have demonstrably shown up in content generated by the tool1, making proper review and editing by a subject matter expert an absolute imperative.
Brand voice, personality, lived experience and perspective, the unique needs and interests of a specific audience also require human insight and understanding. These are also the very elements that will make that content authentic, resonant and successful in achieving its aims. This marketing use case illustrates just how much more effective that real, live person can become with ChatGPT. Using the tool to draft the foundational content, a marketer could conceivably build ten highly-nuanced landing pages, drawing on their deep knowledge of the specific vertical and customer audience each one is targeting, in the same amount of time it would normally take them to draft a single page from start to finish. More and better content, launched faster, translates directly into increased bottom-line revenue. Imagine that effect replicated across the various contexts and activities of your organization. The numbers start to add up… fast.
The active application of ChatGPT in everyday business operations is a “when,” not “if,” question, so it’s great that you’re getting out ahead of it. But before implementing any official policies around the use of ChatGPT, I would encourage you and your team members to open an account with OpenAI (openai.com) and just start playing around with it.
The likely response, especially of someone fearful of having their talents rendered obsolete by ChatGPT, will be a combination of awe and relief. It is truly amazing to see what this platform has the potential to do, but its limitations also become quickly apparent. And aside from dispelling fears, asking your team to explore the tool through the lens of productivity and quality-of-work enhancement can generate ideas for applications at the department or role level—and outcomes at the business level—that you may not have considered.
Answered By Angela Spencer, Director of Digital Transformation Services, Ensono
1 Olivia Solon, “Is ChatGPT an Eloquent Robot or a Misinformation Machine?”, The Washington Post, January 2023.
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