It’s hard to imagine, but the advanced text generator ChatGPT was brought online as a “small research project” by OpenAI a year ago today. It happened so quietly that not everyone inside knew about it. How different now.
It is not often that technology has such an impact on society in such a short time. According to a study by Deloitte, around one in three Dutch people sometimes use a productive AI tool such as ChatGPT. From education to the media world and the business world. They all had to deal with it.
Even before the summer, it was clear that the business community was busy trying out applications like ChatGPT. NOS research now shows that major Dutch companies (ABN Amro, ASR, Heineken, ING, KPN, Nationale Nederlanden, Philips and Randstad) are still working on this issue. This also applies to the former Dutch multinationals Shell and Unilever. One is further than the other.
Wait or wait
Roy Ikink, chief technology officer at consulting firm Accenture in the Netherlands, says a turning point has now been reached. “Companies have reached a point where they know what is possible and what their approximate limits are. The question they face now is: Do I dare to grow, or do I wait another year?”
Many companies do not use ChatGPT directly, but use the technology behind it through Microsoft. When asked, the software giant stated that it did not want to give the exact number of users in the Netherlands, assuming it had hundreds of customers in the Netherlands and more than 18,000 worldwide.
Generative AI is also used in edge services, among other things. This happens, for example, at ABN Amro and the insurance company Nationale Nederlanden. An AI system listens to an employee’s conversation with the customer and suggests a summary.
Goal: an intelligent chatbot
Tjerrie Smit, Head of Artificial Intelligence at NN Group, says this saves time and allows employees to focus solely on the conversation. Seven call centers currently use it for the Nationale Nederlanden brand.
For him, this is just the first step. “As a result, I want a chatbot that will answer your question instantly. “So when you ask where on our site you can find how to report an activity, the chatbot takes care of it immediately.” However, Smit emphasizes that this is not the case yet.
“With ChatGPT, we met a chatbot that you can do anything with and can answer all questions. People now expect a company to have a chatbot to do this.” But he says companies can’t take the risk that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, took: that mistakes will be made.
The image below was created by NOS using ChatGPT with the following question (in English): Create an image of ChatGPT after 1 year of use. According to the tool, it aims to present “a portrait of ChatGPT, symbolizing its journey and growth after a year of use.”
Meanwhile, NN Group is testing a kind of “super” Wikipedia. In fact, it is a knowledge base where you can ask anything. More and more companies are doing this. “Once we see that there are no more errors, we will make this available to our customers.”
NN Group was already working with OpenAI technology before it was publicly available. Heineken recently got involved. Heineken head of analytics Surajeet Ghosh says the company is still in the experimental phase. “Since the models still make a lot of mistakes, we want to be very careful and learn how the algorithms work first. “This is a big risk.”
Don’t create marketing materials with AI
Heineken is testing the consolidation of large amounts of documents. Employees can also ask questions to an internal chatbot, and customer feedback is aggregated using artificial intelligence. Heineken can also use AI to create marketing materials such as posters. But Ghosh says the company did not do this consciously.
“The biggest risk is that we will be accused of plagiarism because it comes from a copyrighted image and we don’t know it,” he says. “So creating new content is very risky.”
While OpenAI has already made a big move with consumer versions of ChatGPT, companies are much more cautious. After all, there is a lot at stake for them.
In any case, they will rely heavily on Microsoft. The company has been an important supplier to the business world with its well-known office programs for many years. The Teams communication platform was added during Corona. Now the technology giant is about to become even more indispensable and therefore more powerful.
Source: NOS
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
