Top five ChatGPT uses in the workplace
It’s both my job and my passion to keep up on the latest developments in technology. But for my dad, who is happily retired and can go days without opening his email: not so much.
When I was visiting my folks last week, I introduced my father to ChatGPT. After less than an hour of playing around with the sophisticated AI chatbot, he was obsessed and has since called me multiple times to discuss how he’s now using this AI in his day-to-day life.
Sure, there is a lot of hype about ChatGPT and how it will transform work and society. But we’ve already heard that recently about blockchain and the metaverse, only to see both struggle to gain mainstream traction—so far, at least.
However, seeing my dad’s reaction to ChatGPT really got me thinking. If someone like my father can find so many inspirational applications for ChatGPT, I can only start to imagine what it can and will do for organizations. And utilizing ChatGPT will only help to reveal new questions, ideas, and use cases.
Here are my recent thoughts about the top five applications of ChatGPT in the workplace (watch now):
1. Customer service
When contacting customer service, nearly 80% of people prefer to interact with a human versus an automated response. Frustrating bot-based customer service is bad for a brand. Yet, it is difficult and expensive to offer comprehensive human customer service. ChatGPT upends this calculus.
ChatGPT can learn and build upon answers and responses. When connected to an internal database, it will change our ability to respond to organization-specific customer service requests like “How do I get a permit?” or “Where is your nearest office?” Moreover, it will be able to create content and lay out answers in a visual format, like “Please send me a report of last month’s sales.”
2. Language translation
We live in a shrinking world where it is increasingly essential to communicate across regions, languages, and cultures. Existing translation technologies help with short questions and commands and can interpret small blocks of text. That is a start, but ChatGPT has the reading and comprehension capabilities to understand longer materials—and take translation to the next level.
ChatGPT can determine an employee’s location and automatically translate pages of content into the person’s local language. For developers and other technical talent who don’t speak English or Mandarin, this will save an immense amount of time, effort, and expense to bring their work to market — time that can be rededicated into improving the experience of the end user. There is also great potential for ChatGPT to build automated assistive workplace technologies like real-time screen readers and sign language translations for people with disabilities.
3. Summarizing
Email was supposed to speed up work correspondence, so we’d all have more time to focus on deep work. Instead, we ended up filling our days with ever more correspondence with more and more people. Newer work messaging platforms have only increased the deluge of communications. From emails to messages to reports, ChatGPT can summarize and deliver key information to busy employees.
When incorporated with Word or Outlook, ChatGPT will be able to distill information and separate out what you really need to know. It will be able to take an email, turn it into an action item, and place it into a workflow that is shared with a wider team. Less time spent responding to correspondence and playing catch-up means more time spent on work that adds value to your company.
4. Content creation
The other side of the “ability to summarize” coin is the ability to create outgoing writing and visuals from email responses to reports to external-facing online content. Employees may not be able to turn all of their writing duties over to ChatGPT, but they will definitely be able to unload a number of the more routine responsibilities and get writing ideas and support where they need it.
Yes, ChatGPT can answer an email and fill out a leave request form or other in-house paperwork. But it can also create a 10-step health and safety hazard report or a blog detailing business performance or a new trend. In recent years, even the most technical of employees have been tasked with a degree of creative writing responsibilities in their communications and internal marketing of their work. ChatGPT can be a dependable partner to greatly alleviate that burden and, sometimes, remove it altogether.
5. Code validation
From workflow builds to suggestions, ChatGPT can kick off, review, and improve code. Whether getting you going with a solid framework or drilling in on existing work to determine how to enhance and optimize, ChatGPT supports coding much in the same way it supports writing.
Technological innovation increasingly relies on citizen developers who have a great idea or insight to meet the needs of their organization but have little or no formal training in programming. ChatGPT is a crucial tool to facilitate the work of citizen developers and help them to achieve coding goals that were once beyond their reach.
As I’ve seen with my father, ChatGPT has struck a chord with people who previously didn’t understand that AI could have a role in their lives. When AI goes from the theoretical to the practical, as in the case of ChatGPT, it creates a juggernaut of use cases and applications. And it will have a profound impact on automation and the world of work.
There are still a lot of things that ChatGPT can’t do. But we can keep learning and defining new ways for it to enable us to work in ways that are ever-more to our liking.
