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\nEveryone is chatting about ChatGPT these days because it\u2019s one of tech\u2019s most intriguing new developments.\u00a0Within five days of its November 2022 introduction, over a million people were using it<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, the fear, uncertainty and doubt about ChatGPT is rampant.\u00a0Concerns include:<\/p>\n These concerns, along with the fact that ChatGPT does not know a company\u2019s proprietary information, have left many business leaders with the conclusion that, while ChatGPT is fascinating, it isn\u2019t fit for use in their business. Right now, some may be perplexed about the potential business use cases because all they see is a text box on the OpenAI ChatGPT landing page<\/a>. To be useful in a business context, the AI underlying ChatGPT must be embedded in the applications and workflows business people use every day, not a remote text box on a third-party website. When this happens, the potential efficiency gains will be massive.<\/p>\n The latest AI isn\u2019t a tech fad that will pass. It\u2019s going to be a revolutionary game-changer possibly as big as the internet, affecting all aspects of society in profound ways.<\/p>\n One of the first areas recent AI advances will impact greatly is customer service and support \u2013 the exchange of information between companies and their customers. In one survey <\/a>of businesses, customer service was the highest area of AI deployment with 61% of companies focused on using AI for customer service.<\/p>\n Why prior generation customer service chatbots must evolve<\/strong><\/p>\n Chatbots are a modern website staple, but to the disappointment of brands, customers often find them frustrating. Chatbots were first adopted to provide customers with faster issue resolution, but their lack of intelligence can make them a barrier <\/em>to issue resolution. Chatbots were adopted with the goal of lowering costs through automation, but there have been some common problems.<\/p>\n For one thing, many chatbots aren\u2019t really \u201cintelligent,\u201d because they don\u2019t utilize AI. Instead, they\u2019re deterministically programmed, to ask a fixed set of questions and produce a given output. Developers are provided a list of frequently occurring problems and the appropriate troubleshooting steps to program into the chatbot. However, since humans aren\u2019t always predictable, they may ask questions outside the chatbot\u2019s programming, which requires more programming. Customers may also state queries in ways that have not been anticipated, which also requires more programming. While this endless cycle of continuous improvement is admirable, it may not come soon enough for customers who are frantically trying to solve a problem.<\/p>\n Enter the latest AI. A large language model (LLM) like the AI underlying ChatGPT has been trained on an enormous volume of data, basically much of the information on the internet. Because it was trained on such a massive corpus of language, LLMs have the ability to understand and generate language unlike anything we have seen before.<\/p>\n Traditional chatbots attempt to understand the intent of a customer\u2019s question and then return a static answer that the chatbot developer matched to the intent. No matter how a customer asks a question, once it is mapped to an intent, all customers get the same answer.<\/p>\n For example, if my daughter lost her credit card and I sought the advice of a chatbot, the best the chatbot would do was to provide the standard answer about how to replace a credit card. It would not provide the answer personalized to my situation with my daughter.<\/p>\n A next generation chatbot (we call it an Assistant) is different. It can tell me that my daughter should contact the credit card company and report the card stolen.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a huge difference in capabilities. In fact, the delta between traditional chatbots and ChatGPT is so great, that the businesses which refuse to experiment with it now will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage later.<\/p>\n The truth is that no one understands all the ways that the AI underlying ChatGPT will be used just yet. What we do know is that the capabilities will be integrated into the everyday systems we use as consumers and professionals. In other words, people won\u2019t be flocking to OpenAI\u2019s webpage to see what ChatGPT can do. Instead, they will start reimagining jobs, workflows, applications and processes based upon LLM powered AI.<\/p>\n\n
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Mike Myer is CEO and co-founder of