By Have you tried ChatGPT yet? Go on and give it a try if you haven’t!
“ChatGPT is at capacity right now. Get notified when we’re back.”
That’s because the chatbot, trained by OpenAI, has taken the world by storm since launching in November of 2022. Whether using ChatGPT to ask for advice on how to start your own business, write meta descriptions for SEO website optimization, identify market and economic trends… or, yes, even write the lyrics to a song… users are flocking to ChatGPT to ask a question, and receive an instant answer.
Just consider the following statistics.
ChatGPT reached one million users in the first week of November 2022. 100 million by January of 2023. It took just five days to get to one million users, compared to 10 months for Facebook and 3.5 years for Netflix 10 million queries are made per day Microsoft has invested $10 billion dollars in Open AI Open AI is valued at $29 billion after the launch of chatGPT.
The overwhelming user adoption represents strong market intrigue around AI even amidst very real and grounded concerns that ChatGPT can get the answers factually wrong, that bias exists within the data that generates the answers and that academia is swiftly having to get ahead of the trend as students resort to asking the bot to write their essays, among other concerns.
But this is to be expected.
As with any technological advancement, we must enter judiciously, strategically, and thoughtfully. We have to remember that technology always improves over time; that as adoption peaks, we need to stay ahead of potentially harmful impacts; and study user trends. Because as we’ve seen with past innovations — be it social media, cloud, IoT, etc. — once the use cases for gains, improvement, and advancement are understood, the innovation often takes on a life of its own, shifting quickly from emergent to mainstream.
If we look beyond the ChatGPT hype, there are a sea of learnings that we as business leaders can take away from the bot, specifically as it relates to building the business world of tomorrow.
Let’s dive into 3 right now:
Our Teams Are Ready for AI: There’s a reason our teams are flocking to ChatGPT to get its help with everything from writing sales calling scripts to asking for Excel hacks to asking it to optimize blog content. Our teams are tired. Amidst a sea of layoffs, quiet quitting, inflation, or [insert whatever pain point is top of mind for them here], gaining a quick productivity boost matters.
It saves them time. It allows them to focus on more value-add work. And it enables them to “outsource” the things that are slowing them down. We need to examine trends like this for what they are — telltale signs of what our teams are expecting their workplace to start to look like. As you think about your own business or department, a quick question to reflect on is “What tasks or responsibilities are draining my team? Where could we be automating and going faster?” The answers might be immediate indicators of where you can integrate an AI boost.
Automation Makes Humans Superhuman: Sure, there is a lot of concern about whether AI will replace humans one day. It’s why our newsfeeds are dominated by articles and predictions from influencers, economists, and futurists about what they see happening. But a central theme is also becoming quite clear. AI will never replace humans.
Rather, it will automate the tasks that free our teams up to become superhuman. My colleague Walter McAdams, our Chief Engineer, recently wrote a blog about where to best integrate AI into your business. One of my favorite tips that he shared? “When organizations combine the things people do best with the things machines do best, they create a synergy that is far more powerful than each on its own.” You can dive further into his post here. Our job as leaders is to look at the places where our businesses can most benefit from automation and complex data processing so that our teams can move faster.
Business “Consumerization”: For so long the worlds of business-to-consumer and business-to-business were nuanced. Specifically when it came to how to market and sell to your end clientele. But if ChatGPT — and other AI-fueled services like Siri, Amazon, and Netflix- have shown us anything, it’s that we expect that the consumer functionality we have in our everyday lives also finds its way into our business worlds.
We’ve grown accustomed to asking Siri questions. We love that services like Amazon and Netflix tee up recommendations based on past movies and shows we’ve watched. ChatGPT is reinforcing something similar. We love that we can ask it questions like “how should I cook my chicken?,” “what real estate market is hot right now?,” and “where is the best place to travel in the spring?” The way we interact personally with our favorite services is now the way we want to be able to interact in our business worlds. Companies need to take note because our ability to provide our teams with the tools they need and want to do their jobs is quickly becoming table stakes.
So whether your days are now full of ChatGPT prompts, or this is the first you’re hearing of the chatbot, no problem! It’s never too late, or early, to explore how emergent innovations provide clues as to what will happen in our business worlds next.
But today is a great day to do some digging. Check out some recent articles. Play around with the chatbot. And, perhaps most importantly, open up a dialogue with your team about how they see AI making their work lives a bit better.
You might be surprised by how far along they already are in envisioning their future working environment, aided by artificial intelligence.
Written by Carrie Majewski, Vice President of Growth Strategy, SQA Group
