Boosting business efficiency with AI

The emergence of advanced language models like ChatGPT has presented businesses with exciting opportunities to optimize operations and enhance productivity. While leveraging ChatGPT can be beneficial, exercising caution and employing human review is crucial to ensure accuracy and reliability. In this blog post, we will explore how ChatGPT can be utilized in a business context, emphasizing its advantages while acknowledging the need for caution and human oversight.

Important considerations

While ChatGPT offers immense potential, it’s essential to recognize its limitations. AI models can sometimes provide incorrect or misleading information. Therefore, it is crucial to implement a human review process for content generated by ChatGPT. Human experts should review and validate the output to ensure accuracy, credibility, and alignment with business objectives. This human-AI collaboration ensures that the final content reflects the business’s values, avoids biases, and meets the highest quality standards.

Also, you must exercise caution with the information you share while doing business at Texas State. ChatGPT is not an authorized software at the university, so it is important not to upload sensitive or confidential data to the platform. Please refer to the university’s Data Classification guide for data classification and handling instructions.

Benefits

Here are a few ways we can leverage ChatGPT to benefit business operations at the university.

Enhanced customer communication

Effective and personalized communication with customers is crucial for business success. ChatGPT can assist in crafting professional and engaging emails, social media posts, and customer support responses. By providing initial drafts to ChatGPT, businesses can receive suggestions to refine their messages, ensuring clarity and maintaining a consistent brand voice.

Example

It’s that time of year for performance planning, and I would like my team to start brainstorming goals for next year. I entered the following request into ChatGPT:

“Please write an email to my staff to start working on three goals for next year to be included in their performance plans.”

Initially, ChatGPT generated an incredibly long and verbose email, so I asked it to make the message more concise. After several rounds of back and forth, ChatGPT finally generated an email worth sending:

Dear Team,

As we plan for the upcoming year, it’s important to set new goals that will drive our success and growth. I invite each of you to contribute to this process.

Let’s establish three key goals for next year, shaping our performance plans and guiding our focus and development. Your input is vital to ensure these goals align with our aspirations.

Here’s our plan:

1. Brainstorming session: We’ll schedule a team meeting next week to generate diverse ideas. Think about short and long-term objectives that match your roles and responsibilities.
2. Goal selection: We’ll evaluate proposed goals based on relevance, feasibility, and alignment with our objectives and organizational priorities.
3. Refinement and finalization: After narrowing down the options, we’ll make the goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

By involving everyone, we foster collaboration, accountability, and a culture of growth. Our goals should challenge us while remaining attainable, pushing us to exceed expectations. Setting goals together fuels our professional growth and departmental success.

Come prepared with ideas and suggestions for the brainstorming session. Reach out if you have questions beforehand.

Thank you for your dedication. I look forward to our discussion and the opportunities ahead.

Best regards,

Ryan

Content generation and curation

Generating high-quality content is time-consuming for businesses. ChatGPT can aid in developing initial drafts of blog posts, articles, or social media updates, providing inspiration, and reducing the burden of starting from scratch. Furthermore, ChatGPT can assist in content curation by summarizing articles, conducting research, and extracting key insights, enabling businesses to share valuable information with their audience. As aforementioned, I must reiterate the importance of human verification and review of ChatGPT’s findings.

Example

ChatGPT generated the framework for this blog post. I started with this initial request:

“I’d like to write a blog post that states ways we can use ChatGPT in a university setting, with examples such as cleaning up emails to be more professional, writing blog posts, generating emails, etc.” 

I reviewed some of the entries and asked ChatGPT to refine the results.

“Can you redo that with less of an emphasis on the university setting and more on the business aspect? Also, address that ChatGPT may give incorrect information and should only be used as a framework to be human reviewed prior to utilization.”

Afterward, I reviewed and removed sections that I felt weren’t relevant, changed the wording as necessary, and added sections to get the blog post you see now.

Programming frameworks

ChatGPT can be a helpful resource for starting programming projects. The tool can offer guidance on project structure, coding patterns, and best practices by providing a project outline or specific requirements. However, it’s important to note that ChatGPT may generate variables, properties, or code snippets that need careful review and validation from human programmers.

ChatGPT should serve as a guide rather than a definitive source, with human experts conducting thorough reviews before executing any code. Regarding programming, ChatGPT may give you faulty information, such as methods or properties that don’t exist. Despite this, the framework it provides is valuable and may save you time.

Example

I wanted to know how to obtain the IP address and computer name programmatically using the PowerShell scripting language, so I asked ChatGPT the following question:

“How do I use PowerShell to list the computer name and IP address?”

It returned the code below, which, after reviewing, was safe to run and returned correct information.

$networkAdapters = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | Where-Object { $_.IPEnabled -eq $true }

foreach ($adapter in $networkAdapters) {

$computerName = $env:COMPUTERNAME

$ipAddress = $adapter.IPAddress[0]

Write-Host “Computer Name: $computerName”

Write-Host “IP Address: $ipAddress”

Write-Host “—————————”

}

In conclusion, ChatGPT holds great promise for businesses seeking to streamline operations, improve communication, and enhance productivity. However, human review remains essential to verify and refine AI-generated content to ensure accuracy. By cautiously harnessing the power of ChatGPT, we can unlock new possibilities and drive innovation in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-powered solutions.

Ryan Lara is a technology architect for Network Operations.