LEVERAGING AI AND CHATGPT

Sanjeewaka Kulathunga reviews the impact of AI-powered tech in business

ChatGPT is the latest technological breakthrough – and despite being only a few months old, it has already caused massive ripple effects for global businesses and organisational behaviour. And it’s easy to see why the use of this technology in the corporate setting will grow in popularity.

It’s an AI-powered chatbot that responds quickly and efficiently to business related queries from executives, employees and stakeholders. And yet, as with any new technology, there are positive and negative aspects that corporates should be aware of in terms of ChatGPT and its impact on organisational behaviour in general.

This artificial intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI was released in November and is based on the research laboratory’s GPT3 family of big language models. It has been fine-tuned through a transfer learning method with both supervised and reinforcement learning models. Following the launch of ChatGPT, the market value of OpenAI was predicted to be valued at US$ 29 billion earlier this year.

ChatGPT can perform a wide range of routines and standard corporate duties by decreasing the workload on employees and allowing them to focus on more value added activities. It can also lower the cost of hiring by automating numerous regular business operations without too much complexity.

Besides that, ChatGPT is able to respond reliably and promptly when there’s a need to provide an answer to management or support for a customer inquiry.

It’s not surprising that the technology has already begun to redefine the scope of business while increasing the power of innovation and assisting firms in growing bigger at an efficient speed with effective outcomes.

Artificial intelligence-powered ChatGPT will be able to help businesses enhance their products, processes and decision making at lower costs. For example, a company could keep an AI-powered chatbot available for 24 hours to handle customer inquiries instead of hiring customer service professionals.

However, there are some issues that corporates need to be mindful of such as when the language processing capacity is not as fluent as needed. Chatbots may not fully comprehend the intricacies of human conversation and this could result in misunderstandings or misinterpretations.

Due to the lack of human intervention and judgment, ChatGPT may deliver responses that don’t take into account the background, or distinctive circumstances or characteristics of individual consumers or employees since it doesn’t have the ability to do so yet.

Similar to other AI systems, ChatGPT makes decisions based on the data it has been trained on. If that data is biased, the system may perpetuate a prejudiced inclination in its recommendations.

Furthermore, the privacy of data related to employees, consumers and any other interested parties will be a critical issue with the application of ChatGPT if it’s not properly secured. It will then negatively impact organisational data security and lead to chaos in the collective psyche of the company.

Due to the wide use of ChatGPT, there will be a higher risk of replacing some jobs – particularly white-collar professions such as accountants, financial analysts, lawyers, trainers and so on. Though coding and computer programming are in high demand, ChatGPT and other AI technologies may fill some of the gaps in the near future.

Software and web developers, computer programmers, coders and data scientists are very susceptible to automation. Indeed, modern artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT have the potential to generate code faster than humans, implying that work can be performed with fewer employees. Therefore, business leaders and HR teams should be more concerned with easing the concerns of employees due to the risk of job loss. Analysing and interpreting massive volumes of language-based corporate data and information is a demanding skill that AI technology can help with.

Corporate executives will now be able make strategic decisions for sustainable business growth.

In the areas of finance and investment, artificial intelligence can be used to identify market trends, highlight which investments in a portfolio are performing well or poorly, transmit this information and then use many other forms of data to forecast a better investment mix.

Senior corporate leaders must focus not only on adopting new technologies and carrying out change management, but also addressing the impact of ChatGPT and other forms of AI on their teams.

Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT will continue to be part and parcel of our lives but they must be viewed as collaborative and working components alongside people, rather than as replacements for human decision making at an optimal level where both technology and people leverage strengths.