Some early adopters are already experimenting with the generative AI program ChatGPT at the office. In seconds, consultants are conjuring decks and memos, marketers are cranking out fresh copy and software engineers are debugging code.
Almost 30% of the nearly 4,500 professionals surveyed this month by Fishbowl, a social platform owned by employer review site Glassdoor, said that they've already used OpenAI's ChatGPT or another artificial intelligence program in their work.
Respondents include employees at Amazon, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Google, Twitter and Meta.
The chatbot uses generative AI to spit out human-like responses to prompts in seconds, but because it's been trained on information publicly available from the internet, books and Wikipedia, the answers aren't always accurate.
While ChatGPT set certain corners of the internet ablaze when it launched for public use in November, awareness is still filtering out to the broader public. Experts anticipate that this kind of AI will be transformative: ChatGPT will become the "calculator for writing," says one top Stanford University economist.
Microsoft is in talks with OpenAI about investing as much as $10 billion. The software giant is also looking to integrate GPT, the language model that underlies ChatGPT, into its widely-used Teams and Office software. If that happens, AI tech may very well be brought into the mainstream.
Marketing professionals have been particularly keen to test-drive the tool: 37% said they've used AI at work. Tech workers weren't far behind, at 35%. Consultants followed with 30%.
Many are using the technology to draft emails, generate ideas, write and troubleshoot bits of code and summarize research or meeting notes.
CEOs are using ChatGPT to brainstorm and compose their emails, too. "Anybody who doesn't use this will shortly be at a severe disadvantage. Like, shortly. Like, very soon," said Jeff Maggioncalda, chief executive of online learning platform Coursera told CNN. "I'm just thinking about my cognitive ability with this tool. Versus before, it's a lot higher, and my efficiency and productivity is way higher."
