March 2, 2023

Since ChatGPT, a generative AI application, launched in November 2022, we’ve experienced a non-stop hype cycle around the public chatbot that with a few prompts can generate human-like answers.

In the coming months and years ahead, we can expect the hype cycle to continue as more companies roll out and refine alternatives to ChatGPT and OpenAI continues to refine its technology.

In fact, the generative AI market is expected to experience rapid growth in the coming years, as much as 36% through 2032, according to The Brainy Insights, and investor interest has soared. Earlier this year, Microsoft made a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the research institute behind ChatGPT, and has already vowed to deploy OpenAI’s models across its suite of consumer and enterprise products.

These integrations could be game-changing in the workplace, enabling organizations to unleash unprecedented worker productivity.

But what does that mean for you and your business right now?

In terms of ChatGPT, experts are recommending that you exercise caution for now. You should avoid inputting sensitive or confidential information in ChatGPT. And Bern Elliot, the VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research, recommends starting with “use cases such as classification, summarization, and text generation for non-customer-facing scenarios.” And he says outputs should be reviewed by a human, at least for now.

Looking forward, though, it’s exciting to think about the impact generative AI can have on individual and team productivity, as Microsoft and other integrations become publicly available.

Here are four areas we think ChatGPT and other OpenAI models will drive individual productivity gains, which will add up and have a positive impact on the business.

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Streamlining online research

In early February, Microsoft announced a new version of Bing and Edge browser, which integrates with ChatGPT, and Google has announced its own generative AI chatbot, Bard, and other generative AI bots are sure to come.

While we’ve had search engines for years, AI-powered searches will enable you to communicate with the chatbot in a human way. You can start with a broader topic, and tell ChatGPT to dig deeper, telling it to be more specific until you get the information you need. This conversational nature allows you to iterate through your search easily and pivot topics as new ideas take shape. Plus, you can often avoid weeding through dozens of irrelevant, often sponsored, ranked articles to locate the precise information you want.

This is promising news for people who spend hours researching online. Tasks like researching competitors or compiling data for a new pitch deck could be reduced , as users are instantly provided with insights they can then validate.

Simplifying email

Microsoft is planning to announce ChatGPT integrations with Outlook, as early as March, which could lead to some serious time savings.

For email, generative AI could dramatically improve search results, bringing an end to the days of scouring through dozens (or hundreds) of emails and long email chains. You could simply search for a specific term or subject, and the AI could offer up a short summary explaining what emails on that subject are about. If you need to dig deeper, you would be able to click on a link to go to a specific email.

It could also summarize lengthy attachments, offering a quick summary and even highlighting key information, making everything from meeting prep to decision-making quicker. “Neudesic is doing a great deal of research in this type of semantic search, and how it can benefit our clients. This would give them the ability to ask a simple question, and then the chatbot searches hundreds of pages and offers this useful summary they can act on,” says Jim Brown, Director of Data Science at Neudesic. “It’s a major time saver, but it also enables stakeholders within an organization to get on the same page, move faster, and make better decisions,” he adds.

Lastly, generative AI could recommend responses to emails in your inbox and even help users create sharper, more professional messages with fewer errors.

Optimizing enterprise resource planning (ERP)

For most businesses, investments in an ERP system, like Microsoft Dynamics, yield quick benefits and ROI. Integrating those systems with generative AI would take the solution to the next level, dramatically improving the speed of data analysis.

For example, generative AI could highlight a customer’s main pain point or complaint and then generate a more custom, response script that better resolves the customer's problem. Or corporate leadership could use it to analyze and summarize vast troves of data for key insights on how to take advantage of financial opportunities and avoid risks.

Delivering better code

ChatGPT has been called a developer’s best friend because it can write simple code and or fix bugs more quickly.

Additionally, integrating generative AI with a solution, such as Microsoft’s Power Platform, could make low-code development even more accessible to users with limited development experience.

With ChatGPT, the natural language-to-code capabilities enable users to articulate what they want the code to do in English, and ChatGPT responds with a function or code snippet. For example, a user could ask it to write a function in Python that will remove outliers from a dataset, and ChatGPT would produce the code, including comments in the code, and an explanation in English of what is happening. Users could then ask it to explain the code in more detail or tell it they meant something else, and the response would evolve. It can also be used to translate between programming languages which is helpful for updating legacy code or generating code in a language the developer has less experience in.

ChatGPT is highly helpful when starting a new project because you don't have to start from scratch. It also manages complex and hard-to-remember syntaxes, like regex, so it could free developers time to focus on more important matters, like improving app quality and performance.

Integrating AI into your business, your questions now answered

Across all these use cases, generative AI offers users the ability to ask questions and receive insights that will inform work and business decisions.

Generative AI offers great promise, and Neudesic could see it significantly boosting productivity and efficiency across many departments. If you’d like to learn more about how AI can benefit your business, we’d love to walk you through it. Learn more.