How ChatGPT in Microsoft Office can change the workplace | The AI ​​beat

Over the weekend, The Information reported that Microsoft wants to add OpenAI’s chatbot technology – currently ChatGPT, soon GPT-4 – to its Office suite of productivity technologies, including Word, Outlook and PowerPoint.

I immediately wondered: How would these apps-on-steroids, used by billions of companies worldwide, change the way we work? Especially if Google comes fully into play and integrates its own generative AI capabilities into Google Workspace? Would AI become as commonplace as the simple spreadsheet in our daily work?

Much more than a new Clippy

News of the plans came just a few days after news spread that Microsoft, that $1 billion invested in OpenAI in 2019, planned to embed ChatGPT in its Bing search engine. But this report immediately made those of an earlier generation of tech giggle. Why? One word: Clippy.

Clippy, the Microsoft user interface agent that was included with Microsoft Office in 1997 and launched personally by Bill Gates, was a wide-eyed, burst paper clip that popped up to say things like, “Looks like you’re writing a letter. Do you want help?”

Clippy was especially detested and mocked for its invasive pop-ups. Time even named Clippy one of the worst inventions of all time. Clippy had completely disappeared by 2007, though he came back to life as a cultural icon retro sticker pack in Teams in 2021.

Of course, ChatGPT would be much more than another Clippy – it could potentially do everything from generate text based on simple natural language prompts and suggest responses to emails, to analyze data in Excel and translate text.

Technology investor Puneet Kumar called the opportunity “insanely powerful” in a tweet, adding that it would “further deepen” Microsoft’s moats in corporate office technology:

ChatGPT and similar models are not yet ready for prime time

The information pointed out that Microsoft Word already uses internal AI tools, including Turing’s Smart Find feature and At a Glance, which summarizes Word documents. And it has “already quietly incorporated GPT into Word in small ways”, including in the auto-complete feature.

But implementing OpenAI’s ChatGPT or, soon enough, GPT-4 will have plenty of hurdles to overcome.

First, ChatGPT has a serious accuracy problem, one compounded by its tendency to sound plausible even when it’s all wrong. Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has admitted the risks. That makes creating business documents or advanced workplace integration a no-go at the moment.

Privacy is also an obstacle. How would Microsoft protect corporate data privacy? It’s hard to imagine a large law firm or financial services company that uses Microsoft Office all day long getting help from ChatGPT right now.

Office work will probably change forever

Still, the ability to significantly supercharge the average enterprise’s day-to-day text output — emails, presentations, reports — is too tempting to ignore. As a man named Kevin tweeted:

But it may take some time to understand how Microsoft and Google can make generative AI tools work for businesses at scale, and how enterprises can interact with what employees create.

Forrester analyst Rowan Curran said there are “a lot of open questions about what guardrails and controls companies put in place about how these tools are allowed to be used and how to use them once they’re approved.”

For example, he told VentureBeat by email, “If I have a text generator on my phone that I used to compose a work email or outline a blog post and then publish that as part of my job, I have to would my employer be concerned about, or at least be aware of that?”

So much about our digital office lives — think PDFs, spreadsheets, smartphones, cloud, digital signatures — have become work ho-hums over the past two decades. Whether it’s ChatGPT in 2023 or not, it seems likely that advances in generative AI are on track to transform the workplace as we know it.