The launch of ChatGPT instituted our understanding of conversational AI, albeit it had existed for some years before OpenAI's product spearheaded the idea into the mainstream.
But as this year has unfolded, it's become clear that conversational AI is also a foundation stone for the next evolutionary periods of artificial intelligence to build upon. From Microsoft Copilot to Zoom AI Companion to Google's Duet AI — as we approach the end of 2023, it is generative AI that now has centre stage.
"Generative AI is the next generation, the next level of AI," Jon Arnold of J Arnold & Associates, told UC Today at October's UC Expo 2023 in London. "Up until gen AI, it's really been about advanced search capabilities where you give the inputs, and it finds stuff for you. Generative is now it has the inputs, and it's giving stuff back to you; it's generative. It's producing all kinds of new ways to automate things, which is really handy."
Arnold was enthusiastic about Gen AI's use cases in contact centres and said, "The cool thing about it is the more you train AI tools, the better the generative outputs will be".
"It's a little hard to trust right now where it's headed, and it's so easy to have what they call hallucinations, which basically could be gibberish," Arnold clarified. "It thinks it's giving you something that makes sense, and maybe with the syntax and grammar it is."
There has been scepticism of Gen AI, however, rooted in its misuse of data. ChatGPT extracts user prompts to develop and improve its model unless users deliberately opt out. This has prompted worry that employees might accidentally include proprietary or confidential data or information in their prompts, which ChatGPT leverages to answer future queries.
Data leaks have been common. In June, OpenAI was subject to a class action lawsuit filed in California federal court, saying it extracted "massive amounts of personal data from the internet". The allegation claimed that OpenAI stole and misappropriated millions of peoples' data from across the internet to hone its AI models. In June, Microsoft established legal protections in the form of AI customer commitments to assuage concerns about data leaks, such is the seriousness of the issue.
At this stage of Gen AI's broad development across each vendor and platform, does Arnold believe the use of business data can be trusted to these services?
"The short answer is 'No', but we're going to have to learn how because the possibilities when you get it right are just too good," Arnold said. "AI has scale and speed that we cannot match any other way. The key to this, and why generative AI is interesting, is this whole shift in digital transformation, meaning that the more digital inputs that we have, the more data points AI has to learn and get better with."
"So it may not be great today, but the volume of data it's capturing now is growing exponentially, mainly because the cloud is a great cost-effective way to store data so you can keep adding, adding, adding, and it will get smarter and smarter."
If generative AI is the major trend as 2023 approaches its end, what might 2024 have in store?
