Eight ways generative AI will change the digital workplace, from a digital workplace expert
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, August 29, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — People will, and already are, developing innovative ways to make generative AI work for them. CarMax, a vehicle seller, recently used ChatGPT3 to analyse 100,000 customer reviews and auto-generate 5,000 readable summaries – an activity that would have taken their existing human team 11 years.
AI potential has captured the imagination of businesses, and a recent Accenture survey of 5,000 global executives found that 96% of respondents were “very or extremely inspired by the new capabilities offered by AI foundation models.”
However, with these endless potential capabilities and excitement comes a host of new risks, as businesses scramble for the best way to use the technology in an accurate, ethical way. One of the key concerns is data privacy – Italy has temporarily banned ChatGPT due to these concerns.
Other concerns include the protection of intellectual property rights, information not being correct or up to date, how AI could generalise key processes in a business and, one of the most widely covered, take people’s jobs.
Digital workplace experts, Digital Workplace Group (DWG), who boast clients who are currently utilising AI (such as The Coca-Cola Group, Adobe, Michelin, Wells Fargo and more), share eight ways generative AI will change the digital workplace, affecting our working lives:
1. Generating content
Generative AI has the potential to generate the content that we use across the digital workplaces. Arguably AI will make it much easier, reduce the time required, lower the barriers to content production and help optimise content for elements such as findability and readability.
It’s likely that those organisations that can most effectively integrate the use of generative AI in the content production process without stifling or reducing creative and expert human input will be the most successful.
2. New digital skills and roles
ChatGPT and other generative AI present significant opportunities to increase productivity, but to
get the best out of them requires new digital skills. For example, for end users this might be in how to:
construct queries and requests to get the best outcome
recognise information that is incorrect
navigate multiple areas of risk.
There are also likely specialist roles that can benefit from using generative AI, as well as new roles
that will be created. Organizations will want to also build their own custom applications for internal and external use. Organisations that can build up specialist knowledge around the use of generative AI, while also enabling wider digital literacy, will be in the best position to leverage the use of generative AI. Digital workplace teams can be hugely influential in this respect.
3. Governance
There is an urgent and obvious need for governance in the use of generative AI that balances the
advantages of using tools like ChatGPT to drive productivity, while also reducing the considerable set of risks around data privacy, intellectual property protection, unreliable data and more. Digital workplace teams have a key role to play in establishing and implementing these policies, bringing a balanced and pragmatic view, where different stakeholders will have differing views. As it is likely that governance measures will rely on user trust, there is a strong link here to the digital skills and literacy area.
4. Digital workplace applications
Inevitably, generative AI services are going to be increasingly threaded into different digital
workplace applications, especially as more vendors hook into the ChatGPT API or some of its competitors – with Microsoft’s huge investment in OpenAI, this will include Microsoft applications. The launch of Microsoft Copilot sees the power of generative AI weaved right into Word, Excel, Outlook, Microsoft Teams and more. This again means digital workplace teams have a significant job on their hands to support the roll-out, governance and best use of these applications, with more rapid change on the horizon.
5. Low-code no-code solutions
ChatGPT is also likely to particularly advance low-code no-code solutions where non-IT professionals can create simple apps, workflow and automation, without the help of the IT function. For example, ChatGPT is already producing code and there are examples of people starting to design simple video games. The extent of what non-IT professionals can achieve may well expand again, which may come with a new swathe of governance challenges.
6. Findability
ChatGPT has multiple possibilities to transform findability within the digital workplace. A
sophisticated chatbot like ChatGPT may well prove to be the interface with which people try to find items, but it may also be that the emphasis on findability moves to finding information and answers buried within sources, rather than the original sources themselves.
The generative aspect of ChatGPT also could be used to make existing content more findable, for
example by automating tagging, generating smart summaries and more which helps bring the content people need.
Outside the world of enterprise search, Bing is being injected with ChatGPT, while Google is still
working on implementing Bard, it’s answer to ChatGPT. The evolution of popular search engines has an enormous influence of employee expectations about findability in the workplace as well as the product roadmap of enterprise search applications, so this is another area where AI is likely to
influence the direction of findability across the digital workplace.
7. Expectations
ChatGPT has alerted many to the potential of AI. It seems likely that it will increase the expectations of business stakeholders and employees in what they think their digital workplace and the employee experience should be. This means it could raise the bar on what users want to get out of individual products and the kind of interfaces they want to interact with. Unfortunately, there’s a likely disconnect between expectations and the reality of what can be deployed, something we already see in the world of enterprise search.
8. Change will be exponential
The pace of change in the digital workplace is showing no signs of slowing. With the evolution of
ChatGPT and other AI services, the pace of change is now likely to be exponential as new services are defined, innovations discovered, and other services pushed to integrate generative AI.
Liv Cooper
High Rise Communications
email us here
