Workshop teaches biz applications for AI

Don Harkey: People Centric plans to use AI for research and survey work.

Artificial intelligence and its potential uses for businesses were the focus of an event hosted Aug. 8 by the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce.

Jarad Johnson, CEO of Springfield website design and digital marketing firm Mostly Serious LLC, led the workshop, in which he walked the nearly 100 in attendance through how AI-powered platform ChatGPT can aid businesses with common tasks such as writing emails, summarizing articles and creating job descriptions. Many of those attending brought laptops to follow along with the workshop activities.

“At the highest level, artificial intelligence is a computer system that performs tasks that typically require human intelligence,” Johnson said. “Everybody in here that’s used ChatGPT understands kind of what that means. It understands human types of speech.”

Johnson, who said he uses AI for work and personal purposes, said AI – and ChatGPT, in particular – can automate daily routine tasks, help personalize the customer experience and improve the general communication and writing voice for companies.

“In the business context, there’s so many useful applications for these tools,” he said. “One of my favorite things to do is to use it to help me understand the patterns and trends in large data sets that would take me forever to understand.”

However, Johnson noted that the technology is not a replacement for human experts.

“If you start to use ChatGPT thinking you can replace their expertise, you’re going to be wrong,” he said. “Everybody’s got spectrums of intelligence, and they’ve got expertise in specific areas. And so, it’s a co-pilot, an accelerant, not a replacement.”

Mostly Serious has used ChatGPT for a few months, and its investment in AI led to it in July launching Promptly, a custom AI-powered plug-in for websites on the Craft content management system, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. Promptly, which targets website content creators, uses customized ChatGPT prompts to aid in improving speed and accuracy of work.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and the chatbot reached 100 million active users by January 2023. While the total expanded to nearly 200 million users in May, its growth may have hit a peak, as mobile and desktop traffic to ChatGPT’s website worldwide fell 9.7% in June from the previous month, according to internet analytics firm Similarweb.

ChatGPT is free to use but also provides a premium subscription for ChatGPT Plus, where users can pay $20 a month to access OpenAI’s more advanced model, GPT-4. Johnson recommended businesses subscribe to ChatGPT Plus, which has benefits including faster response times and general access to ChatGPT, even during peak times, according to OpenAI.

Finding uses
As part of a sample marketing plan in the chamber workshop, which was part of its 60 Minutes to Success luncheon series, Johnson had ChatGPT create a rough draft social media schedule and press release.

“I have found that this is one of the things that it’s best at, because press releases are generally boring, and there is a lot of data to train it on how to write press releases,” he said, noting those and marketing plans also need personal touches from people to make them stand out.

Johnson also demonstrated how the AI tool can be a business adviser, helping articulate challenges or strategic goals.

“It’s essentially like having a business partner with you to think through these things, but they’re always on – they’re always available,” he said.

Brandon Krone, manufacturing engineer with NewStream Enterprises LLC, a division of SRC Holdings Corp., said while familiar with AI, he’s a newcomer to ChatGPT.

“I only just signed up for and started using ChatGPT this morning,” he said after the chamber event. “It’s something I’ve talked to our (information technology) team about before.”

While Krone said the IT team had expressed concern to him regarding company data security, he also wondered about risks of someone able to get a hold of company information to create phishing emails.

“I like AI from a research standpoint, and I think it’s really cool. But when it comes to business, I have a lot of concerns about it,” he said, regarding AI use for data analysis and decision-making. “I guess I’m still kind of a skeptic in this sense.”

Still, he believes AI has some practical applications for NewStream.

“I need to play around with the data analyst’s part. That would probably be the most beneficial for us,” he said. “As far as our marketing team, I know they are already using it to write copy for content on the website, which I can see that being a legitimate use.”

Early stages
Acknowledging he tends to be an early adopter of technology, Don Harkey, owner and CEO of People Centric Consulting Group LLC, said his company is in the early stages of using AI.

“We’ve played with ChatGPT a little bit, but we’re still trying to learn what that part of it can do,” he said, in reference to how AI can best help his business.

Harkey recently posted on LinkedIn about People Centric’s intention to not use AI for direct content or automated email campaigns. In the post, he wrote, “The words you hear or read will come from our team and will be designed for you.”

However, he said the company isn’t anti-AI and intends to utilize the technology for research and surveys.

“We do a good share of surveys for clients, and there is significant work that goes into crunching numbers on those surveys,” he said. “We like to do open-ended responses on the surveys. AI can look at the open-ended responses and pull out some trends that we could then read up on and confirm that that’s what it’s actually saying. It might save us some time there.”

Johnson said with any new technology, it’s important for business owners to understand its limitations, what it can do well and where it fails. “The tool is just not always going to work the way we expect, and you have to acknowledge that,” he said. •