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AI-powered chatbots are already being used to send personalized email offers. This shows that AI like ChatGPT could soon play a significant role in business, with companies like Salesforce and Microsoft starting to offer closer integration between chatbots and their software.
A recent viral Tiktok showed how you can use ChatGPT integrated with Google Sheets to write ten custom LinkedIn messages for executives asking for a meeting. He identified different potential companies in the industry and their CEOs and created different notes to cover each one, including a unique question.
“I think we’re at a very interesting inflection point in how we’re going to use artificial intelligence in the future in our daily lives, which wasn’t so readily available even six months ago, before ChatGPT became more publicly available,” said Alex Kloufas, a creator who makes videos about working in the tech industry.
The video — and previous viral posts showing similar techniques — clearly struck a nerve, garnering 2.5 million views and tons of comments asking how it works.
Generative AI and tools that use large language modeling (LLM) techniques like ChatGPT have boomed as big tech companies and startups race to integrate software capable of creating content that resembles what a human would write.
Few LLM based products actually make money. Microsoft and Google are working on integrating next-level chatbots into search engines. Companies are working on using these bots to write marketing copy or computer code.
There is one particularly promising application that could be commercialized in the near future: using the power of a chatbot to quickly write and automate emails with a bit of personalization, perhaps for sales, marketing or personal networking. This week, Microsoft and Salesforce announced new products with just that feature.
Financial analysts at Credit Suisse repeatedly pointed to the creation of email in a note earlier this month as a specific and short-term use of the technology. Analysts estimate that Microsoft’s recently announced AI-generated sales features could help it capture market share and potentially add more than $768 million in annual revenue.
Products entering the market
On Tuesday, Salesforce announced its LLM product called EinsteinGPT, which uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT model. It can automatically write marketing emails—a logical integration because Salesforce’s core product is a web application that tracks how often salespeople follow up with leads.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff demonstrated the software by using it to identify two contacts at the company and then automatically generate a one-sentence email in an attempt to set up a meeting. In a demo, EinsteinGPT softened a cold email after a user told the software to be less formal.
Salesforce has not yet set a price for the tools, but said they are currently in testing with pilot customers.
On Monday, Microsoft announced the integration of ChatGPT-based generative artificial intelligence into a suite of business tools called CoPilot. One of the main features is the use of artificial intelligence to create emails.
In a demonstration video, Microsoft showed the feature integrated into the Outlook inbox and gave examples of its use to respond to a request for proposal or to suggest a time to meet with a client.
In this example, an inbound email wanted to follow up on a potential sales deal, and the Microsoft feature offered four different draft responses, including one that offered a discount and another that addressed the issue.
Microsoft says its AI email writer can take important context from an email stream, such as a previously discussed price, and insert it into an AI-prepared response. In the example provided by Microsoft, a user takes a draft AI and edits it before sending it.
The Microsoft feature is currently in beta testing, but will be released to customers of Microsoft’s Viva Sales feature on March 15, the company said Monday.
Some startups have even trained themselves to develop custom AIs that can respond to messages in the same way as their owners, by analyzing a user’s previous email and text interactions and integrating that into a personalized AI model.
“The benefit is people wanting to communicate with you where you don’t have time to contact them, where you don’t have time to offer your opinion,” said Suman Kanuganti, founder of chatbot personal.ai. currently in beta mode. “In these situations, you can choose to have your AI assist you in co-pilot mode or make suggestions [automatic] answering them on autopilot.”
Disadvantages
Some worry that the ability to generate email text could be used to send spam and that chatbots could be used to spoof people’s private passwords.
“We could see mass targeted messages and spam indistinguishable from specialized email,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note this month that examined the artificial intelligence industry.
ChatGPT is also prone to “hallucinating” or making out. It just predicts what the next word or part of a phrase should be based on statistics and doesn’t know if it’s correct or not.
Microsoft said in its announcement that it will use data from its software to back up answers with facts, and has a thumbs-down button for users to tell the bot that an answer was unhelpful. This helps train the model to avoid making the same mistake in the future. A Salesforce executive previously told CNBC that he is moving as fast as he can without compromising a responsible, ethical approach.
But the limits of ChatGPT were clearly visible in the viral TikTok video. While some of the recommendations were correct, several CEOs recommended by ChatGPT were either former CEOs or are not currently CEOs of the company. appropriate for cold enough, though, that the cold outreach text is appropriate, it still probably takes a human to make sure it’s actually correct.
“I think anyone using this technology, however nascent, should exercise due diligence,” Kluflos said. She did not send the notes created by ChatGPT because she is not currently looking for work.
But she’s still excited about using ChatGPT to help her create TikToks and other social media content. Her latest application is using ChatGPT to create TikTok subtitles with keywords that make her videos easier to find online.
