Is Generative AI an Enterprise Thing?

Last week, Microsoft and Google introduced generative AI tools that make attending meetings, writing emails, scheduling travel, and catching up on projects infinitely easier. The products channel the wonder of ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and Bard into clear, applicable uses. And these obvious uses just happen to be in the workplace. Perhaps it’s no accident.

About a year into the Generative AI phenomenon, it’s becoming evident that the technology is most useful in the enterprise first, with broader consumer adoption perhaps to follow. The booming launch of ChatGPT — 100 million users in two months — made it seem like fast, mass adoption of AI chatbots and their related tools was possible. But ChatGPT was ultimately a demo for companies looking to build on top of the technology. And now, as consumer chatbot usage tails off, they’re shipping.?

At Microsoft’s New York release event last Thursday, I watched as the company revealed products that simplify and automate some of the worst parts of office life. It demoed a text generator that can read long Word documents and write blog posts highlighting the most relevant points. It showed another feature that allows you to prompt its Copilot to summarize a slew of unread messages from an email-happy coworker. The technology can also read transcripts of meetings you miss and note the most relevant parts, or allow you to query the full discussions. Even simple updates like prompting Copilot to create a header image (and we all know the horror of creating those) seem quite useful.?

At work, people will have a real incentive to learn how to use these products, figure out their prompts, and master their intricacies, especially given that their next promotion, raise, or their job itself might depend on it. When the stakes are high, messing around with chatbots and image generators until you get it right is worthwhile. For consumers, the technology can feel a bit daunting, or not worth the effort. As one technologist told me, prompting was something you did on MS-DOS. We’ve built better user interfaces since then.

But as we get familiar with these tools at work, their utility will likely enter our personal lives. We might go from planning a meeting with AI to planning a vacation with it. Or from writing a blog post with a text generator to writing a bedtime story. Perhaps we’ll even ingest relatives’ words into long documents and turn that material into chatbots.?

We’ll also see generative AI experiences more ubiquitously in the products we use every day, making the transition easier. Google, for instance, is connecting Bard to Gmail. And Microsoft is putting its AI Copilot inside Windows, where it will be hard to miss. “Having it in Windows, and having it naturally appear when you need it, is going to trigger average people to try it, and use it a lot more than they do today,” Microsoft consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi told me.

Microsoft is also bullish on how Bing is stacking up vs. Google, challenging reports that generative AI hasn’t helped it gain on its competitor. “We have been growing share with Bing,” Mehdi said. “They’re internal numbers, I'm working to have a third independent third party that we’ll have shortly.”

In the near term, this week’s product releases should further assuage concerns of generative AI taking our jobs. These products are assistive, all but allowing you to be in two places at once, and should help cut down on the meaningless work that fills the typical workday. They may cause some homogenization in blog posts and corporate design — something a little human touch can help alleviate — but it won’t put people out to pasture. And it may even make our demanding work days a bit more manageable.