OpenAI and Its ChatGPT Upended Everything: The 2023 CRM Conversation Starters
When it comes to new technologies, few have had as much of an impact as generative artificial intelligence, ushered in by OpenAI in December with its ChatGPT launch.
“I have never seen a technology with so much potential to upend everything we do from a business standpoint for the better,” says Daniel Rodriguez, chief marketing officer of Simplr, a customer experience outsourcing solutions provider.
“The world changed with the launch of ChatGPT, and the opportunity for enterprises can’t be overstated,” Ada’s cofounder and CEO, Mike Murchison, said shortly after the ChatGPT launch.
Rodriguez and Murchison are not alone in that belief. CRM industry insiders almost universally agree that the potential of ChatGPT to completely revolutionize customer interactions is immeasurable. By integrating this advanced artificial intelligence technology into their CRM systems, businesses can provide instant and accurate customer support, gain valuable insights into consumer behavior and trends, identify new sales opportunities, and do so much more, all with levels of personalization and relevance never before considered possible.
ChatGPT is the brainchild of OpenAI, a San Francisco-based startup that calls itself an AI research lab with a declared mission of developing safe and beneficial AI with “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
The company was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit that pledged to share its innovations with the world. Just a few months later, in April 2016, it released a public beta of “OpenAI Gym,” its platform for reinforcement learning research. Later that year, it released Universe, a software platform for measuring and training AI across the world’s supply of games, websites, and other applications.
OpenAI introduced the first Generative Pre-Training (GPT) model in 2018. A year later, it launched GPT-2, a larger model that could generate more coherent text.
Also in 2019, OpenAI transitioned from nonprofit to a capped for-profit model and received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
But 2020 was the real turning point for the company, when it introduced GPT-3, a large language model trained on huge amounts of internet data. GPT-3 had 100 times as many parameters as GPT-2 and could perform various tasks with far fewer examples.
A year later, it introduced DALL-E, a deep learning model that can generate digital images from natural language descriptions.
And in November 2022, OpenAI received widespread media coverage after launching a free preview of ChatGPT, its new AI chatbot based on GPT-3.5. ChatGPT collected more than 1 million signups within its first five days alone.
Uma Challa, a senior director analyst in Gartner’s Customer Service & Support Practice, said at the time that ChatGPT “captured the world’s attention because it signifies the first widely known artificial intelligence technology that challenges the one trait humans always thought they would have over machines: creativity.”
CRM software vendors of every size and shape have been lining up ever since to incorporate ChatGPT into their offerings or to develop their own generative AI models based on OpenAI’s technology. And OpenAI’s valuation as a company soared in response.
In addition to its previous $1 billion investment, Microsoft kicked in another multi-year $10 billion investment in OpenAI earlier this year. Now the software giant is building AI technology based on the same foundation as ChatGPT into many of its software products, including its Bing search engine.
And OpenAI’s work with ChatGPT hasn’t stopped there. Just this past March, the company released GPT-4, both as an API and as a feature of ChatGPT Plus. OpenAI stated that GPT-4 is “more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions” than its GPT-3 or GPT-3.5 predecessors.
“With more and various iterations of generative AI on the horizon, it’s poised to revolutionize numerous aspects of our everyday business and personal lives,” says Eric Jang, founder and CEO of Deepbrain AI. “If you think the last few months have been wild, just wait to see what’s to come as each advancement builds on AI-powered advancement, opening new doors for creative innovation and revenue opportunities we’ve not even begun to consider.”