For many years, artificial intelligence (AI) was perceived to be a nascent technology – one that has demonstrated incredible feats and holds immense potential and possibilities, but still has a long way to go.
That was until Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, more popularly known as ChatGPT, took the industry by storm. Overnight, AI has become a mainstream technology accessible to teams at every level of an organisation.
Launched by OpenAI – a United States-based AI research and deployment company founded by influential and prominent figures such as Elon Musk – ChatGPT set a new benchmark for generative AI by successfully engaging users in meaningful conversations and providing human-like responses based on user prompts.
According to OpenAI, the revolutionary chatbot can “answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests” – such human-quality behaviour that makes ChatGPT a cut above the rest.
Breaking down ChatGPT’s success story
ChatGPT quickly amassed one million users less than a week after opening to the public on November 30th , 2022, and by the end of 2023, ChatGPT is expected to have one billion users.
The AI-powered chatbot uses natural language processing (NLP) to simulate human conversations and produce reasonable-sounding answers. After exhibiting such high-level intelligence, experts believe ChatGPT can pass the Turing Test, an assessment designed by renowned computer scientist Alan Turing to gauge a machine’s ability to think like a human being.
These breakthroughs have impressed not only ChatGPT users worldwide, but also huge investors, such as Microsoft, which recently announced its plans to invest USD 10 billion in OpenAI, following a USD 1 billion investment it made in the company in 2019.
OpenAI is also in talks with other venture capital firms, whose investment may catapult OpenAI’s value to USD 29 billion and establish it as one of the most lucrative start-ups in the U.S.
With ChatGPT leaving a positive impact in the market, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman reportedly anticipates the company to generate USD 200 million in revenue this year and USD 1 billion in 2024.
How is ChatGPT disrupting and impacting industries?
One evident area where ChatGPT can significantly make a difference is customer service, specifically live chat support.
According to research by Zendesk, an award-winning customer service software company, live chat ranks second to phone support in terms of customer satisfaction ratings. However, it takes more than a quick response to deliver customer satisfaction – the quality of the answers matters too.
A separate study made by Comm100, a global provider of omnichannel customer engagement software, found a link between higher wait times and higher customer satisfaction ratings, suggesting that customers were more appreciative of companies that took a bit longer to respond but provided top-quality answers.
By integrating ChatGPT into a company’s live chat support system, it can drastically expand the capacity of its customer service team, while enhancing the quality of responses and automating the process of collecting customer data. ChatGPT also presents companies with the opportunity to be more cost-efficient and redirect their resources to other growth areas.
Leveraging 570 gigabytes of text data, which includes web pages, books, articles and forum posts, ChatGPT is an excellent content creator that can add value to a company’s content strategy. It can be trained to produce content that is relevant, engaging and in line with a target audience’s specific interests and queries.
Harnessing ChatGPT’s content creation ability enables small businesses to accelerate and augment their content production, thus allowing them to divert their team’s focus to optimising processes, strategy and product or service quality. Consequently, this can help increase content performance, boost leads and sales and improve customer retention.
From igniting new ideas for content to instantly generating copy for social media, blogs and emails, ChatGPT offers a wide range of disruptive uses that can easily supplement a business’s activities while reducing the time and resources needed to produce their desired results.
While ChatGPT’s potential seems unprecedented, it also has its share of limitations. OpenAI has disclosed that ChatGPT may sometimes respond with incorrect or non-sensical answers, display biased behaviour, or provide outdated information since its knowledge base covers events only until 2021.
Still, ChatGPT’s ground-breaking features undoubtedly hold a myriad of opportunities for businesses across different sectors to innovate and offer their customers more targeted solutions.
For one, global corporate service providers such as Virtuzone have started to adopt AI to formulate customer-oriented digital tools that address the unique needs of their customer base. One such tool is an automated business plan builder, powered by ChatGPT.
The future of ChatGPT and AI
With ChatGPT’s swift rise to popularity, the next obvious step for OpenAI is to capitalise on the chatbot’s extraordinary growth and continue to refine its functionalities based on user feedback. The company is also reportedly looking to roll out a paid version of ChatGPT, which will be called ChatGPT Professional.
ChatGPT’s overnight success has brought AI closer to the public and increased their awareness of AI trends and tools currently accessible or being developed in the market.
According to research done by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the AI sector can contribute USD 15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, USD 6.6 trillion of which will likely come from increased productivity due to AI technologies and USD 9.1 trillion from the subsequent increase in consumer demand for AI products.
