AI In The Workplace, Are We Ready?
The Inevitable Rise of Generative AI in Business
While ChatGPT may have been the gateway drug, generative AI tools are now proliferating rapidly in the workplace.
Of course, you don’t have to go to ChatGPT to get your AI fix, it is likely a part of the daily office production tools that you are already using.
And if not, it will be very soon.
Businesses that are reluctant to incorporate AI tools or are trying to curtail their use, will find that it to be an impossible task. AI generative features are simply a click away.
Help Me Write
If you are part of the 2 billion that are using Gmail to write your emails, you may have noticed a new shiny ‘help me write’ button. You may ignore it thinking “No way do I want AI to write for me, I want it to be personal.”
And that may be true for now, but as the AI tools start to collaborate and understand your writing style, your data, and your preferences, you will want to hit that ‘help me write’ button.
Google has already started that process of integration. Google Bard will be able to customize its responses because it will be able to connect to your Gmail, Docs, Drive, Google Maps, YouTube, and Flight and hotel data.
Microsoft has also just announced the same type of office features in their Microsoft 365 Copilot suite of tools. Bing Chat will be customized to understand you because it will have access to your data.
Like a super assistant, we will become accustomed to using chat as a means of productivity… something like this…
“Bing, can you pull up the latest info from our recent project x meetings, put them in a ‘to do’ list, create a spreadsheet of a timeline, and formulate an email to [manager name here] to let him know what we are working on?”
Make no mistake, the integration of these business tools will empower the workflow process in crazy new ways, starting with making our productivity tasks more efficient.
Heck, MS Teams is even allowing you to send an AI substitute to attend meetings for you, and then can you speak with your AI Teams assistant to get info about the meeting. Seriously.
Don’t do that.
Help Me Create
AI tools are not only useful for improving business office productivity but also for enhancing the creative process. Marketing and graphic design departments will soon be well-versed in using AI tools.
And similar to the office suites, it’s not about going to a Discord channel to generate images or videos, the tools are coming to your friendly neighborhood applications.
If you are an Adobe Creative Cloud user, generative AI is now officially out of beta and embedded in Photoshop, Illustrator, Express, etc…
Generating images will now be commonplace to chat experiences. DALL-E 3 will be part of ChatGPT and Bing Chat, Adobe Firefly will be part of Bard, and Stable Diffusion will likely be everywhere else.
DALL-E 3 will also be able to generate detailed and accurate images from natural language prompts. What that means is that prompting will be less about magic spells and more about simple dialog. The chat experience.
But the main point here is that generating images, presentations, slides, sheets, and marketing ads will be embedded in your tool suite.
Like a dopamine hit, one click away.
The Business Concerns With Using Generative AI
There are two main reasons why businesses have been reluctant to jump on the AI train.
- They want to make sure to protect their data.
- They are not sure if Generative AI is safe to use because of legal concerns.
Regarding point one on data protection, AI companies have been busy creating safeguards to assure businesses that the data they are generating will remain private.
Microsoft Azure offers a closed network for using GPT and Llama. Amazon Bedrock offers an à la carte of foundation models like Claude, GPT4, Stable Diffusion, Titan, etc… and Google is doing the same with its own models like PaLM and Gemini.
OpenAI has also announced ChatGPT enterprise which offers enterprise-grade security and privacy.
Basically, the tech giants are offering a way to access their models and a way to fine-tune and augment those models to cater to the business use cases and needs.
Regarding the second point on legal concerns, while the copyright laws are still murky on what can be generated with AI, using many of these tools internally for productivity tasks will likely not be an issue.
Using them for creative output will also be challenging for anyone claiming copyright infringement unless the companies were using the exact derivative content or IP branding — like using a Disney character in an image.
Microsoft has even publically stated that it will defend users of its Copilot generative AI tools if the companies are sued for copyright infringement.
In Conclusion
The influx of generative AI into mainstream business tools and workflows is inevitable, as companies like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe fully integrate these capabilities into their popular software suites.
While businesses may have some valid concerns about data privacy and legal risks, they are slowly being alleviated as AI companies are making it easier to privatize their data.
Businesses are beginning to lean in on using AI in their workflow processes as AI features make their way into our tools, so we should expect that this will become commonplace.
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