By Anirudh Kala-Co-Founder & CEO, Celebal Technologies
The current wave of digitalisation is transforming the business landscape at an unprecedented pace, leading to a paradigm shift in how businesses operate. A survey conducted by Deloitte and Fortune found that almost 85% of organisations have accelerated the integration of the latest digital technologies in their business operations since March 2020.
One such technology that has progressed exponentially in recent years is generative artificial intelligence (AI), which describes systems such as Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) used to create novel content comprising images, music, text, or videos. The breakthroughs in generative AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with the emergence of AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Microsoft Bard among others, are drastically transforming how businesses communicate with their stakeholders.
As with any emerging technology, ChatGPT too has led to worldwide apprehensions over its potential misuse, societal impact, data security, and redundancies. However, tools like ChatGPT are primarily created to maximise operational efficiency.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a GPT-powered chatbot that uses NLP to generate human-like responses. Its advanced reasoning, conversational and analytical capabilities further enable ChatGPT to drive digital transformation and innovation across industries. The launch of the highly anticipated GPT-3, marked a significant milestone with its capabilities of generating human-like text by predicting the probability of the next word in a sentence.
OpenAI continued to refine the model architecture and introduced successors like GPT-3.5 and InstructGPT, which exhibited higher accuracy in language modeling tasks and greater proficiency in following instructions with human feedback and eliminating inappropriate language from the responses. In March 2023, OpenAI launched the ground-breaking GPT-4, which surpassed all its predecessors to match human-level performance while solving complex problems with greater accuracy. Further, its multimodal nature enabled it to accept and process both text and image inputs.
With such technological progressions that run parallel to business growth and acceleration, GPT-4 and similar models have become essential for businesses to streamline their communication and operational processes.
The sophisticated, multilingual conversational capabilities along with real-time sentiment analysis and personalized responses have placed GPT-4 at the center of many business units such as customer support. It further collects data and key insights from customer interactions and reviews by identifying complex patterns and relationships, enabling better decision-making. Based on these insights, ChatGPT develops promotional strategies, assists with research, generates content for different platforms, and suggests keywords for SEO optimisation.
Perhaps the most noteworthy advantage of the model is that it enables companies to enhance employee satisfaction and increase operational efficiency by automating several laborious and repetitive tasks such as document generation, allowing employees to focus on other business aspects such as strategy and decision-making.
The operational efficiencies further extend to departments such as Human Resources, wherein the teams can utilize ChatGPT to provide employees with tailored study material, real-time feedback, and guidance throughout their learning trajectories, empowering them to leverage their full potential.
In addition, by linking ChatGPT to human resource management systems (HRMS), businesses can offer 24*7 employee support, including flagging mental health issues in employees by analysing their inputs and then recommending personalized solutions. While AI chatbots cannot replace human-based therapy, they can serve as a supplement, ensuring easy access to affordable mental health support.
There are numerous ways in which businesses can benefit from the integration of GPT models. Organisations need to consider the risks and ethical concerns the technology poses such as bias, misinformation, privacy, and accountability, and take proactive steps to navigate them.
Morgan Stanley stated that ChatGPT often hallucinates and produces answers that may be seemingly convincing but are incorrect. Even though ChatGPT has content moderation filters in place to prevent sexual, hateful, violent, or harmful content, these guardrails are easy to circumvent by rephrasing the prompts. Eight countries including Italy, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba have banned ChatGPT due to concerns over privacy and misinformation and several companies have also started banning employees from using the chatbot due to fear of data leaks. The development of responsible AI practices that prioritise fairness, transparency, and accountability is critical in mitigating these ethical challenges surrounding ChatGPT. It requires careful selection and training of data, regular bias audits, transparent decision-making processes, and the establishment of clear ethical guidelines and regulations.
As these large language models continue to evolve, the worldwide embrace of their disruptive potential is inevitable. ChatGPT will play an increasingly important role in business operations and digital transformation across industries and early movers will reap the most benefits. Staying abreast with the latest developments in generative AI and NLP technologies will allow businesses to thrive ahead of the curve and gain a competitive advantage in their respective markets.