Chatting with ChatGPT
A week or so ago, my colleague Nkem and I were having a play around with the AI-tool of the moment, ChatGPT. We were trying to come up with a suitable picture for an advert. We asked ChatGPT to describe a woman, of African descent, carrying a golf bag, in an African setting and walking along a long winding road. The results were striking.
Whilst we were exploring this new technology, I started thinking about the business cases for the ChatGPT and also how it could affect my day-to-day life. And not only business and personal requirements — the applications in terms of education or lifestyle are potentially endless.
But let’s take a look at the business case; ChatGPT has the potential to power the ultimate business development executive. Giving them access to a complete treasure trove of reference and data points, in addition to AI-powered selection criteria to help sort thoughts, motivations and narratives.There’s a high level of intelligence that can come up with the first level piece of work, from which they can build on. This is an extremely powerful application.
Which businesses will be most affected? Well, banking will certainly feel the effects. I’ve spoken at length previously about the inefficiencies of human account officers; they are prone to bias and have limited data points to make fully informed decisions; to make the right decisions. They were already being usurped by chatbots, but now with the advent of ChatGPT, we see a product that not only processes huge swathes of data, it does so without emotion. ChatGPT isn’t in a bad mood due to getting stuck in Lekki Toll traffic. It presents the facts, without bias. Simply. Its use case in the banking industry is clear, and there’s already been speculation as to what the growth of this platform will have on workers. Will AI will replace people? No, people who use AI will replace people [who don’t].
Let’s look at some service sectors. Will ChatGPT replace a driver? No — we still need that offline application of someone driving you from A to B. But we will expect that driver to use some form of AI to find the best route for you. If you had to pick between a driver that uses Google maps and another that doesn’t… who will you select? When you look at it in the context of competitiveness — individuals, businesses, nations — people who adopt technology and AI are going to be more competitive. A nation like Nigeria, with 100M+ people under the poverty line — could really be in peril. If we continue to be so far removed from technology and AI, then we will be replaced by other nations who have adopted the technology en masse, and will easily be more competitive than us.
At Sparkle, we need to embrace AI even quicker. We have to provide intelligent services much faster and more reliably. AI is something we invested in heavily from the start, via our Indy chatbot; We were pleased with the interface and use case, but now ChatGPT will make us up our game again. It will force us to be even more competitive. Indy’s evolution has always been focussed on becoming our customers’ own personal intelligent assistant. Her job is to help Sparklers fulfill our mantra, What do you want to do today? Simple.
AI is here to stay; once we’ve tasted great experiences that are efficient and simple, we won’t go back. It’s addictive. We won’t go back to the old ways. Companies that don’t adopt this and don’t embed digital and AI into their working and operational practices, will slide down the competition scale.
