ChatGPT plugins will accelerate the advancement of Machine Customers

The pace of generative AI advancement is just dizzying isn't it? This week came news that OpenAI is now offering ChatGPT plugins. These "enable ChatGPT to interact with APIs defined by developers, enhancing ChatGPT's capabilities and allowing it to perform a wide range of actions"?says the announcement.

OpenAI suggests one of the main benefits of the plugins is to "Perform actions on behalf of the user; e.g., booking a flight, ordering food, etc."??These are activities that human customers currently perform, that can now be delegated to software acting on their behalf.

For example one of the early adopters is OpenTable. They suggest that with the ChatGPT plugin a person could ask: "My girlfriend loves Japanese food, what’s something similar that has reservations for this weekend in downtown LA?"??In this situation the human customer is turning to the software as if it was a hotel front desk concierge. The searching and shopping action is being delegated from human to machine.

Another example is Expedia. They show here how ChatGPT enables a conversation with the bot software that is almost the same as if you were turning to a professional human travel advisor. From the vendor's point of view (airline, hotel, tour operator) the software is taking more of the search and selection action away from the human. The question then becomes - how does the vendor's marketing and sales effort influence the software?

Some of this is already happening faster than Don and I anticipated in our new book - When Machines Become Customers. In the book we explore the implications of this important megatrend, how you should reframe your thinking around it and what actions to take to ensure your company gets ahead of it.