As Businesses Clamor for Workplace A.I., Tech Companies Rush to Provide It

Earlier this year, Mark Austin, AT&T’s vice president of data science, noted that some of the company’s developers had begun using the ChatGPT chatbot at work. When developers get stuck, they ask ChatGPT to clarify, fix or refine their code.

This seems to be a game-changer, Mr. Austin said. But since ChatGPT is a publicly available tool, he wonders if it’s safe for businesses to use.

So in January, AT&T tested a product from Microsoft called Azure OpenAI Services that lets businesses build their own AI-powered chatbots. AT&T is using it to create a proprietary AI assistant, Ask AT&T, that helps its developers automate their coding process. AT&T customer service representatives also started using the chatbot to help summarize their calls, among other tasks.

“Once they realize what it can do, they love it,” Mr. Austin said. Forms that used to take hours to complete only take two minutes with Ask AT&T so employees can focus on more complex tasks, he said, and developers who use the chatbot increase their productivity. by 20 to 50 percent.

AT&T is one of many businesses eager to find ways to tap into the power of generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers chatbots and that has captured Silicon Valley in a frenzy in recent months. Generative AI can create its own text, photos and videos in response to prompts, capabilities that help automate tasks like taking meeting minutes and cutting paperwork.

To meet this new demand, tech companies are racing to introduce products for businesses that incorporate generative AI. In the past three months, Amazon, Box and Cisco have unveiled plans for generative AI-powered product that generates code, analyzes documents and summarizes meetings. Salesforce also recently launched generative AI products used in sales, marketing and messaging service Slack, while Oracle announced a new AI feature for human resources teams.

These companies are investing more in AI development. In May, Oracle and Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital arm of Salesforce, invested in Cohere, a Toronto startup focused on generative AI for business use. Oracle also sells Cohere’s technology.

“I think this is a complete evolution of business software,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, about generative AI. He called it “this incredibly exciting opportunity where, in the first moment, you can begin to understand what’s inside your data in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

Many of these tech companies are following Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. In January, Microsoft made the Azure OpenAI Service available to customers, who can access OpenAI technology to build their own versions of ChatGPT. As of May, the service has 4,500 customers, said John Montgomery, a Microsoft corporate vice president.

For the most part, tech companies are now launching four types of generative AI products for businesses: features and services that generate code for software engineers, create new content such as sales emails and product descriptions for marketing teams, search company data to answer employees. questions, and summarize meeting notes and long documents.

“It’s going to be a tool that people use to accomplish what they’re already doing,” said Bern Elliot, a vice president and analyst at IT research and consulting firm Gartner.

But using generative AI in the workplace comes with risks. Chatbots can generate inaccuracies and misinformation, provide inappropriate responses and leak data. The AI ​​remains uncontrolled.

In response to these issues, tech companies are taking some steps. To prevent data leakage and to improve security, some are engineering generative AI products so that they don’t store a company’s data and instruct AI models to only answer questions based on the source of the data. data.

When Salesforce last month introduced AI Cloud, a service with nine generative AI-powered products for businesses, the company included a “trust layer” to help obfuscate sensitive corporate information and promises that what users type into these products will not be used to retrain the underlying AI model.

Similarly, Oracle said that customer data will be stored in a secure environment while its AI model is being trained and added that it will not make the information visible.

Salesforce offers AI Cloud starting at $360,000 per year, with the cost increasing depending on the amount of use. Microsoft charges for the Azure OpenAI Service based on the version of OpenAI technology a customer selects, as well as usage volume.

Currently, generative AI is used mainly in workplace situations that carry low risks – rather than highly regulated industries – with a human in the loop, said Beena Ammanath, the executive director of Deloitte AI. Institute, a research center of the consulting firm. A recent Gartner survey of 43 companies found that more than half of respondents did not have an internal policy on generative AI.

“It’s not just about using these new tools efficiently, but it’s also about preparing your workforce for new types of work that may develop,” said Ms. Ammanath. “There are new skills needed.”

Panasonic Connect, part of Japanese electronics company Panasonic, started using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to build its own chatbot in February. Today, its employees ask the chatbot 5,000 questions a day about everything from drafting emails to writing code.

While Panasonic Connect expects its engineers to be the main users of the chatbot, other departments – such as legal, accounting and quality assurance – also turn to it to help summarize legal documents, brainstorming solutions to improve product quality and other tasks, said Judah Reynolds, head of marketing and communications at Panasonic Connect

“Everyone is starting to use it in ways that we didn’t see ourselves,” he said. “That’s why people take advantage of it.”