AI chatbots are already used to send customized email pitches. In addition, it sheds light on how AI, like ChatGPT, may play an important role in business in the near future, as companies like Salesforce and Microsoft have begun to tighten integration between their software and chatbots.
Several viral Tiktok videos have shown that it is possible to use ChatGPT integrated with Google Sheets to write ten customized LinkedIn messages to executives asking them to meet with you. Different potential companies in an industry are identified by this application, as well as their CEOs, and different outreach notes are generated for each one, including a unique question to ask them.
“I think we’re at a very interesting inflection point regarding how we’ll begin to use artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives in the future that was not as easily accessible even six months ago before ChatGPT was more widely available to the public,” said Alex Klufas, a creator who makes videos that focus on working in the tech industry.
With over 2.5 million views, and scores of comments asking how the technique worked, this video seems to have struck a nerve - which is evident from previous viral posts displaying similar techniques.
As big tech companies and startups alike race to integrate software that is capable of creating content similar to the content that a human would write, Artificial Intelligence and tools using large language model (LLM) techniques have sparked a boom in the use of algorithms that produce content that resembles what someone would write.
There are very few LLM-based products that are actually making money. Google and Microsoft are working together to integrate next-generation chatbots into their respective search engines in the near future. There are companies who are working on using these bots to write marketing copy or computer code for their products.
There is an application that seems to have the most potential to be commercialized in the near future in terms of using the power of a chatbot to quickly write and automate emails with a bit of personalization, perhaps for use in the field of sales, marketing, or personal networking. This week, both Microsoft and Salesforce announced new products that include this exact feature in them.
Credit Suisse analysts mentioned email generation several times in a note they released earlier this month as an example of how the technology can be used in a concrete and near-term way. Analysts have estimated that Microsoft's recently announced generated AI sales features could help it gain market share and add up to $768 million a year in revenue as a result.
Products coming to market
EinsteinGPT, which is an LLM product that uses the OpenAI ChatGPT model, was announced by Salesforce on Tuesday. In addition, it can also automatically compose marketing emails - a logical integration, since Salesforce's main product is a web app that keeps track of how often salespeople contact leads in order to keep those leads as engaged as possible.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, demonstrated the software on Tuesday with a tweet he sent, showing it identifying two contacts at a company, and then automatically creating a one-sentence email to attempt to set up a meeting. During the demo, EinsteinGPT softened the tone of the cold outreach email after the user asked for the software to be less formal in the email.
Although Salesforce has not yet set a price for the tools, it has said that it is in the process of testing them out with pilot customers.
As part of a new set of business tools called CoPilot, Microsoft announced on Monday that it would integrate generative AI based on ChatGPT into a suite of AI tools. Among its most important features is its ability to generate emails using artificial intelligence.
Microsoft demonstrated the feature integrated into an Outlook mailbox and demonstrated how it could be used to respond to a request for a proposal or to arrange a meeting with a client.
An inbound email followed up on a potential sales deal, and Microsoft's feature provided four draft responses, including one that offered a discount and one that addressed a concern.
There is a claim made by Microsoft that its AI email writer is capable of taking context from the email thread, such as the price that was discussed previously, and inserting it into the email response that was drafted by the AI. Using the example provided by Microsoft, a user takes the AI draft and edits it before sending it to the recipient.
A new version of Microsoft’s Viva Sales feature, which is currently in beta testing, is expected to be released on March 15 to customers of the company’s Viva Sales feature, according to the company.
It has even been reported that some startups are working on a customized AI that can respond to messages in the same way that their owners would, by analyzing a user's previous emails and text messages and incorporating them all into a personalized model of AI that can respond to messages in the same way as the owner would.
“The advantage of this chatbot is that you can communicate with people in a way you might not be able to in person, or where you may not be able to offer your mind," said Suman Kanuganti, founder of personal.ai, a chatbot that is currently in beta mode. “When this happens, you will be able to either choose to have your AI assist you in co-pilot mode or offer them [automatic] responses in autopilot mode. In these scenarios, you can choose to have your AI help you."
Shortcomings
Chatbots could be abused to steal people's passwords, and the capability to generate email text could be abused to spam people.
JPMorgan analysts have written in a note this month that the AI industry could be indistinguishable from dedicated email if mass-targeted messages and spam were becoming undistinguishable from dedicated email.
ChatGPT can also hallucinate, or make things up. By using statistics, it predicts what the next word or part of a phrase should be, but it doesn't know whether it's correct.
Data from Microsoft's software will be used to ground replies in fact, and users will be able to thumb down responses they don't find helpful. In this way, the model is trained to avoid making the same mistake in the future. In an interview with Trade Algo, a Salesforce executive stated that the company was moving as quickly as possible without compromising its ethical, responsible approach.
However, the limits of ChatGPT were clearly visible in the viral TikTok video that went viral last week. Even though some of the recommendations made by ChatGPT were correct, a number of the CEOs ChatGPT recommended for outreach were either former CEOs or no longer hold any executive positions at the company. The text for the cold outreach looks appropriate, but it is likely that it will still require a human to make sure everything is actually correct even if the text looks okay.
Kluflas believes that anyone using this technology, regardless of how nascent it is, should conduct due diligence. ChatGPT did not generate any notes for her since she is not looking for work at the moment.
Nevertheless, she is still excited about using ChatGPT to help her make TikToks and other social media content for the future. It seems she is now using ChatGPT to produce TikTok captions that are packed with the keywords that make her videos easier to find online, in order to make it easier for people to find her videos.
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