Artificial Intelligence goes Mainstream with ChatGPT and Microsoft Azure

News about ChatGPT, Chinchilla, Sparse Lumina base, and other AI platforms is flooding the media and with good reason. In an unprecedented five-day span, ChatGPT achieved one million users, outpacing previously set records by Netflix — 3.5 years, Airbnb — 2.5 years, Facebook -10 months, Instagram — 2.5 months, and iPhone — 74 days.

Fueling momentum, Microsoft announced an additional $10 Billion investment in Open AI, parent of ChatGPT, and will make the service available through their Azure cloud platform to enterprise customers.

GPT 4, set to release in Q1 2023, touts 100 trillion parameters entirely eclipsing the 175 billion parameters offered by GPT 3. As data quantity, quality, and algorithms continue to improve, as they have with GPT 3, the implications and possibilities for the application across an enterprise are astounding.

GPT 4 will be the most powerful technology available through low code in history and will fundamentally transform every element of a modern organization including Marketing, Sales, Products, Human Resources, and Supply Chain.

Advanced AI tools like ChatGPT remind me of Google search in 1999 — the minute you received your first search results, you knew it would transform every organization on the planet. The same goes for ChatGPT and similar AI platforms. ChatGPT can write an article about AI in less than five minutes (See AI Goes Mainstream by ChatGPT) and it will be nearly as good as the one I could write in five hours.

Without question, AI is the next transformation fundamentally changing customer expectations, bringing about new and innovative business models, changing how we work, and dramatically improving the performance of organizations in the next 24 months.

If you’re wondering about the practical, near-term applications to business, look no further. Here are three, real-life examples of how the transformative power of AI has already been realized:

A telecommunications company headquartered on the east coast is now able design, test, and launch a new personalized customer experience that brings sales at a lower CPA within weeks versus months. That’s a fundamental shift in the customer acquisition equation.

A consumer goods company that spends over a billion dollars in media now uses an AI/ML approach to optimize media and promotional spend by running thousands of simulations analyzing millions of signals. With surgical precision, they can cut investments without impacting sales. This is an example of an AI solution that can now be implemented within weeks, saving companies up to 20% of their media and promotional budget, all while increasing sales.

A manufacturing company in the Midwest uses AI based demand sensing to adjust inventory by recognizing new customer buying frequencies, macro-economic events, promotional and other indirect effects with a lot less data and significant improvement in forecast accuracy. This delivers immediate value by reducing stockouts and increasing inventory turn.

And this is all just the beginning — the C-suite leaders I speak with aren’t questioning AI’s potential disruptive impact to profit pools or the fact that it will drive the next wave of transformation in organizations. Instead, they are focused on three things:

1. Developing a Game Plan: Formulating an AI strategy and roadmap that frames the vision, value delivered, and operating model for the transformation.
2. Identifying Quick Wins: Getting self-funding projects like the examples above up and running to quickly deliver value, build momentum across their organizations.
3. Building Partnerships: Developing the partnerships needed to co-source, not outsource, an AI platform and capabilities and ensure they build the AI muscle and IP internally.

While the first chapter of Digital Transformation was focused on digital platforms like Google, Meta, and Adobe, the next chapter will be about the Artificial Intelligence transformation that will change how we shop, work, learn, operate organizations, and create value. Get ready for an amazing journey!