Tips for Using ChatGPT in Your Business

Most of the initial ‘chatter’ about ChatGPT has died down, but its presence is pervasive these days. Both Bing and Google are leveraging this advanced artificial intelligence language model, and as more people learn what it is and how to use it, we can expect it to continue growing rapidly in the business and personal tools that we use every day.

It's also having a revolutionary effect on the way businesses get things done as well as how they interact with their customers. It’s being used for everything from emails to generating ideas for product names.

Integrating ChatGPT into your business operations requires caution and careful consideration, even though it’s easy to be drawn in by the tool’s personalized and informative responses in real-time. You want to make sure that things don't get out of hand with employees using the tool irresponsibly.

It is important to understand that your IT services provider, whether in-house or an outsourced Managed Services Provider (MSP) cannot protect you against what ChatGPT does, because it’s all about the unfortunate and potentially embarrassing text it may produce. ChatGPT will not directly attack your network, although in hackers’ hands it can produce malicious code used in phishing attacks.

How to use ChatGPT most effectively?

This one is no different than most new technologies in that initially, they are often mistake-prone. ChatGPT is actually potentially more capable of making mistakes than most. You’ll see a warning about this when you start using ChatGPT. It is strongly advised that you do NOT use the responses it provides without having a human first review and edit it.

If you want it to, it can write you an employee device use policy, but there may be things in that auto-generated policy that aren’t quite correct. It’s best to use it as a prompt, not as a replacement for human-generated content.

Potential bias is another weakness: just like anything else, ChatGPT is engineered by humans, and examples of political bias have already been found. Wikimedia Commons reports on a request for it to write two poems of praise: One for Trump and one for Biden.

It refused to write a poem for Trump, only noting that, “As an AI language model, I strive to remain impartial and neutral.” It then offered to “write a poem that celebrates the office of the President of the United States, which Donald Trump once held.”

Funny how it didn’t have that same ethos for Biden, for whom it spat out twenty adoring lines over 5 stanzas literally gushing about the President:
Small sample:
“In the land of the free, a leader stands tall,
A beacon of hope, in times of great strife,
A voice for the voiceless, heeding their call,
A man with a plan, to transform their life.”

How does that old saying go?
“Garbage in, garbage out.”

It is wise to keep politics out of professional correspondence – unless your business is politics, but this certainly makes one wonder who programmed it. In an era of widespread accusations of misinformation, disinformation and ‘fake news,’ this is extra cause for concern.

ChatGPT can pick up some bad habits as it considers vast amounts of content to pull information from. This could be a reason you sometimes get biased or shocking responses from it. Understand that in human terms it is still a child that needs supervision. Don’t hand over the keys to the car unless you’re in the passenger seat paying close attention.

Establish Well-Defined Roles for ChatGPT

It's essential to define ChatGPT’s specific role before integrating it into your business. These roles can range from answering customers to generating ideas for new products, but it should not include anything of critical importance. Can you imagine a trial attorney leaving his/her closing arguments up to ChatGPT? No – it is a non-human servant. Promote it to positions of authority at your own peril.

Leverage its power and ensure that guard rails are put in place by defining its role. The technology is still fairly new, so it’s not advisable to let your employees use it for everything – the fallout is unpredictable.

Determine exactly which tasks the company approves for ChatGPT use and which it does not. Enact new Policies & Procedures (P&P) to allow your team to use it only where you deem best and preclude improper use.

Customer Privacy is a Priority Consideration

Every industry has mandated compliances to meet, and they are engineered to protect your customers’ data. Privacy is a crucial aspect of any business, and ChatGPT should not be an exception. As you integrate the tool into your work, it's important to consider customer privacy. In March of last year, Italy banned ChatGPT due to data privacy concerns. Since then, the number of countries that have banned it swelled to 15.

You need to be aware of any exposure of employee or customer data to ChatGPT to limit the potential for data leakage. For example, after data collection reaches a particular threshold, you can configure ChatGPT to stop collecting customer data.

Mandatory Human Oversight

Do not let ChatGPT run wild - it is an aid to human interaction, not a substitute. It's crucial to have human oversight to ensure the output it gives is relevant and accurate. Human oversight can help stop inappropriate responses that may negatively impact your business.

Your Existing Customer Service Policies and ChatGPT

Integration of ChatGPT into your customer service channels can be extremely useful as a way to benefit customers, providing real-time responses to customer queries. It can improve customer experience while also reducing workload. You can also integrate it into your website, social media, and other support channels. Never forget that human beings need to monitor ChatGPT and its responses.

Optimize and Measure Performance

Taking accurate measures any tool’s performance is crucial to ensure that it's providing value, but even more so with ChatGPT. Measure its performance by analyzing customer satisfaction, response time, and responses handled.

Perform a comparison of productivity statistics. Does using ChatGPT to write the framework for customer emails save time? Or does it take just as much time for your team to edit its responses? If the oversight takes as long – or longer - as the task, some re-thinking is in order.

You can optimize ChatGPT to improve its performance based on your own productivity analysis. This helps it to be a better support for your business.

Transparency for Your Customers

Be up front with your customers if you’re using ChatGPT for email responses or other things. Your customers should appreciate your honesty and innovation. For example, you could simply state the following in your policies: “We leverage AI for certain content, but always edit and fact-check its outputs.”

The use of AI-generated content is a murky area right now. Responsible companies tell their customers exactly where and how they are using it. If a mishap does occur, damage control should be easier to manage.