Generative AI Pushes Forward In Enterprise Tech

OpenAI's ChatGPT technology will be integrated into Salesforce and Microsoft's business-software apps this week.

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As many enterprise technology leaders remain wary of the deployment of unfamiliar chatbot technology known for occasionally producing false, inaccurate, or confusing results, many companies have added ChatGPT-like tools to their business-software systems. Microsoft Corp., Salesforce Inc., and other large enterprise technology companies have added ChatGPT-like tools to their business software systems.

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It is predicted that long-standing relationships with millions of commercial customers will enable veteran IT vendors to accelerate the adoption of the technology across the enterprise market, in part by integrating the technology into their software products.

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Pund-IT Inc.'s president and principal analyst, Charles King, believes established vendors, such as Microsoft and Salesforce, understand their customers' commercial needs and goals. When selling complex products with little, if any, market experience, Mr. King stated that these factors are especially important when selling complex products that have little, if any, market track record.

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The generative AI technology behind ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that goes viral on the internet, is based on algorithmic language models that have been trained on vast amounts of online data. Based on these models, software applications are designed to recognize, understand, and produce coherent text, images, or lines of computer code from prompts from the user using recognition algorithms.

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Several of Microsoft's core business apps, including enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, have been enhanced with artificial intelligence-powered features built with the help of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. These new features are based on natural-language models and generative artificial intelligence.

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It is intended to automate repetitive tasks in areas such as customer service, sales, and marketing through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), such as writing email responses to customer inquiries, summarizing sales meetings, and creating promotional materials, according to Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's corporate vice president of business applications.

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"One of the biggest opportunities for this next-generation artificial intelligence is that it can interpret images and text, which will unlock a lot of potential in terms of productivity and the customer experience in business workflows," said Mr. Lamanna. “It is our belief that generative AI will enhance the efficiency of the modern workplace and will become one of the key components in the future," he said.

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Microsoft announced last week that it would invest billions of dollars into OpenAI, an artificial intelligence startup launched in San Francisco in 2015 and that it would eventually integrate generative AI across all of its enterprise software products.

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During the pilot programs that were carried out to test the new tools, Mr. Lamanna said the issues that were raised by corporate users included concerns over data security and control, as well as ensuring the results produced by the AI apps did not violate the company's ethical guidelines.

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As a safeguard against these risks and others, the new tools are trained on data from the customers' own systems, enabling them to ground results in reality, he stated. While at the same time, the apps are never directly communicating with customers and are never taking action directly on their behalf, instead they provide content that is reviewed and edited by a human, according to Mr. Lamanna.

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On Tuesday, Salesforce announced plans to integrate OpenAI's generative AI technology across its customer relationship management platform, including Slack, the group-chat app that Salesforce acquired in 2021, as well as its CRM platform. The new set of AI tools, dubbed Einstein GPT, is currently in the pilot phase, according to Clara Shih, chief executive of Salesforce's service cloud division 

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“It is wise to remain cautious, especially when a lot of CIOs and developers are coming to us with questions about how to use generative AI responsibly in a day-to-day business environment,” said Ms. Shih. 

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In order to make sure that customer results are relevant, she said, the new tools combine public data with the customer's own data in Salesforce's cloud. She explained that the tools are also designed to employ a human in the loop, so, for instance, a human editor may be able to fact-check and refine AI-generated marketing copy before it is used in the real world.

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As with Microsoft, Salesforce is also investing heavily in the development of generative AI technology. On Tuesday, Salesforce announced that it would launch a $250 million fund to invest in startups that are developing generative AI.

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Even so, analysts say that most corporate tech heads are still waiting to see what the generative artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT will be able to accomplish, despite the assurances from the market’s biggest players.

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In a recent survey conducted by Enterprise Technology Research, fewer than 12% of the nearly 500 decision-makers surveyed in the field of information technology said they planned to use OpenAI or allocate additional resources after they were initially assessing it. A total of 44% of respondents were unaware of OpenAI technology but had no plans to investigate it further.

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The remaining 41% of companies that said they were evaluating OpenAI technology or planned to do so, according to Erik Bradley, ETR's chief strategist, is a record-high share for any emerging technology vendor. As a result of OpenAI's release of ChatGPT as a free online chatbot in November, which has begun to gather momentum behind the technology, he said, even at its earliest stage of evaluation.

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Several companies will be more easily persuaded to move beyond testing and into real-world application scenarios with the help of large enterprise technology firms embedding these capabilities into their legacy products, Mr. Bradley said.

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There may be a possibility that enterprise technology sellers may be able to sell the functionality by bundling it into existing applications at first. “It may be that this is the beginning of a successful process,” according to Bern Elliot, an analyst with Gartner Inc., a distinguished vice president. Mr. Elliot believes that IT giants, as well as other vendors, will succeed, but on an incremental basis, rather than all at once.

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Rather than relying on small niche providers for generative AI capabilities, Steve Santana, chief information officer at educational-testing company ETS, said he is more open to engaging large enterprise-technology firms in the development of these capabilities.

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“Most of these large providers already have long-standing relationships of trust and have existing contracts with many of them,” Mr. Santana said, “so we are confident they will be able to handle any issues that may arise.”

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Inventive AI, which is also known as generative AI, has shown great promise, but it is still in its early stages, according to Rob Zuber, chief technology officer at San Francisco software maker CircleCI. Mr. Zuber added that it is very important to know that large enterprise vendors like Microsoft and Salesforce are in the early stages of their own application development.  

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Rather than being influenced by what one IT vendor is doing, he said he would recommend looking for one or two real problems that you believe might help your organization, running a test, and measuring the results, rather than being compelled by what one vendor is doing.