I said at the start of January that AI was one of the three important trends for marketers to watch this year, and I also said “you ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of game changing AI. However, even I didn’t expect things to move this quickly.
In the first half of March we’ve seen a flurry of announcements. Buckle up and let’s dig in.
ChatSpot
Here’s ChatSpot – the integration of ChatGPT and associated AI technology into HubSpot.
A really fabulous piece of work by Dhamesh and the HubSpot team, and a time saver and game changer for HubSpot users everywhere. Example: Report generation is now a case of asking ChatSpot to “generate a report that shows A, B, and C”, and it does so immediately. Up to now, this might have been twenty minutes of searching, clicking, and dragging. Now, type the question, hit return, and bob’s your uncle. Dhamesh tells the whole story here:
GPT-4
OpenAI announced GPT-4, and the next generation of generative AI, with capabilities well beyond the already impressive reach of ChatGPT. Example: Draw by hand a diagram of a web page you want to build. Take a picture of it and ask GPT-4 to build it in HTML, and you have your website. Watch the whole announcement here. The hand-drawn web page bit starts at 16:15:
Copilot
Microsoft has announced Copilot; an AI assistant fully integrated into the productivity tools (Excel, Powerpoint, Word, etc.) in the Microsoft 365 suite, with some very impressive capability. Example: You join a Teams call which is already in progress; CoPilot will summarise for you what has already been discussed. Here’s Satya and the Microsoft leadership team to explain more fully:
And more…
Add to this announcements by Google this week that AI will be integrated into Google Docs, and from companies like Daimon, taking generative AI to new places, and the rate of innovation becomes clear.
I also said in January that this moment is an inflection point. That’s even more evident now. In three months, discussions around GPT-3/GPT-4 have already moved from how it can help with content creation (draft blog posts) to how it can be used to create complete websites in a few hours at almost zero cost and with no coding knowledge.
We’ve already moved from “this will transform knowledge work” to “this is transforming knowledge work”, and this pace of change is only going to accelerate.
Generative AI is now impossible to ignore. It’s up to each of us to make sure we understand this sea change in knowledge work, and how it might impact what we do. There is lots of information freely available on the web about each of these AI tools, how they work, and what they do. The challenge to all of us is how can we adapt, adopt, and find opportunity in the capabilities of generative AI.
~ Jonathan
