Businesses That Ignore ChatGPT Could Find Themselves Left in the Dust

Recently, OpenAI’s Natural Language Processing tool ChatGPT went viral for all the right (and wrong) reasons. On one hand, it’s giving users a seemingly-limitless array of use cases for creative, academic, and business-use language generation. On the other hand, ChatGPT is taking students’ tests; the tool passed a core MBA exam at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

This has, understandably, led to concerns around the ethics of using AI tools and the possibility of powerful language generation tools like ChatGPT putting people out of work. But before business professionals get worried, remember that tools like ChatGPT are only as good as their users. They still need humans to ask the right questions — before probing and critically analyzing the answers.

Does ChatGPT have the power to revolutionize the way we work for the better? As of now, it’s capable of generating ideas for marketing campaigns, writing complex code, creating chatbots that engage with customers, generating leads, and even responding to DMs and messages on Instagram. Even if there are valid concerns about the tools accuracy, if businesses engage with it as a tool that’s still sorting out its own kinks, businesses could find that its efficiencies outweigh its early issues. If the number of users registered on the platform is any indication, adoption of ChatGPT isn’t slowing down. Like most cutting-edge technologies, early adopters benefit the most in the long-run; if businesses don’t start weighing how ChatGPT could support their operations, by the time they do implement the tool, it could be too late to make a competitive difference.

David Boyle, co-author of PROMPT, a “practical guide to brand growth using ChatGPT,” is convinced of ChatGPT’s utility in business settings, but still urges caution when using the tool.

David’s Thoughts

“The biggest lesson for ChatGPT is to start with a very clear view of what it is you are trying to do. Don’t ask what it can do. Don’t start there. Start with your life. Say, what am I struggling with? I hate writing proposals. So that’s the first place I start to work out how to use ChatGPT to help me.

And it helps amazingly once you work it out! Start with a pain point, like a job you are trying to do, and then work out how to use ChatGPT to help you to do that job.

The biggest risk I see is that companies do not embrace AI. Just imagine your competitors who are better, faster, and cheaper. I think AI like ChatGPT is like an electric bike for the mind. You still have to pedal. You have to do some work. It’s not free, but you can embark on longer journeys. So, the biggest threat I see is not embracing it when everybody else will. It’s a superpower. It’s an electric bike for the mind. It’s a 20 or 30% productivity saver, minimum!

I think it’s important for business leaders to use it in the right way. Don’t rely completely on AI. Always use human judgment, expertise, and experience to kickstart the process, to pick the task, to pick the prompts, and to craft them. The first round of output is never what you want to go with. You always want to use judgment to say, ‘huh, let me change that!’”