It’s official, ChatGPT flipped my business upside down.

It is hard being a startup. Even harder when a product like ChatGPT comes along and fundamentally changes the landscape.?

Rather than trying to avoid ChatGPT, I decided to throw my arms around it, roll up my sleeves and embrace it (it was the advice of many personal advisors as well as newsletters I read, such as Lenny’s newsletter).?

It did mean that I needed to flip things upside down. However, that’s the reality of the tech industry. If you’re not moving with new developments, you’ll quickly fall behind.

What is my business: OYA

OYA is focused on trying to change one of the biggest problems for those who work the tech industry: Soft skills. It’s no secret that when it comes to soft skills, software engineers have a bad reputation. OYA wants to change that, for good.

One of the most important parts of our approach was to use the best techniques, knowledge and processes. It only makes sense to provide tech professionals with learning that will work for them. OYA operates in Slack , and is highly interactive. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort writing and adjusting all of OYA’s lessons. Iterations were plentiful, especially once we started getting it in users hands.

When ChatGPT emerged, a lightbulb went off; how could I use it to improve OYA?

What we had to change!

First and foremost, we had to start using ChatGPT as an internal tool.?

The best way to learn is to dive head first and become an active user.

I started with simple tasks and worked our way up to more complex, multi-step ones. ?

• I’ve used the playground as a way to test variables and tweak responses.?
• I wrote about it and read about it. Seeing what others are saying and contributing to the conversations with my experience.

I am now a premium subscriber to ChatGPT. I’m an addict. I’m hooked. I use the phone app daily.

I’ve discovered the limits of what it can do. I encountered hallucinations and battled with the generic response it sometimes generated.

In the end, it felt like a participant in a conversation, only it was someone who would never progress a topic forward.?

Secondly, we brainstormed ways my business could use the tool.

It was our aim from the beginning to be able to use ChatGPT in our business as a tool. We had to practice what we preached. So when we say we embrace and encourage innovation, we could mean it. So where did our brainstorm land us?

Content research and creation:? At OYA, we strive to deliver useful and engaging content, not just content for ‘clicks’. Sifting through the noise and vast amount of ‘copy and paste’ articles to find the necessary information can be time-consuming. AI has the ability to do the grunt work for us so we can focus on the bigger-picture messaging.?We had to train it to our style and our source material and ensure a human always read what it wrote before it went out.

Customisation: Our training program is customisable and adaptable to each learner. We are still working on this, but our goal is to be able to generate custom content based on learning history, company goals, personal needs and many other data points.

Data Collection and Processing. Soft skill training is an ongoing process. We need data about our clients in order to continuously improve the content. Processing chunks of data quickly is a great way to speed up a lot of tasks. We have had to be careful to ensure privacy is always protected, but once we did some thinking, incorporating privacy became easy.

What we struggled with:

Yes, there were some things we discovered ChatGPT was not great in using:

• Gamification and socialisation: Learning is more than just content. It is about delivering behavioural adjustments through knowledge retention, change management and meaningful social interactions. Tasks that ChatGPT and other AI are not designed for. Gamification and socialisation of content are important for knowledge retention and making change happen.
• A replacement for human interactions. People just are not ready for that. However, there are many minor tasks involved that can be sped up with AI.
• Everyone, including MacKinsey, agrees that tools like ChatGPT will change the way we work, just no one understands how at a very strategic level.

We asked if our clients were open to embracing AI technology

OYA quickly jumped on the bandwagon but would our clients be as excited about it?? It wasn’t long before I found a client who wanted to test it out.?

I had been chatting with a potential client about ChatGPT, and I mentioned that we were looking at using it. The client jumped at the chance to see how it would work.?

I built a roadmap of stuff I needed to do. This got very long very quickly. There have been some major speed bumps and learnings, but it was great to have an open mind on the other side.

Some clients are just like that.

Dealing with Hulicinations

"Hallucination" is the technical term when an AI says something that is plainly incorrect.?Unfortunately, they are more common than you realise. I even wrote a post about an epic #fail by a lawyer trying to use ChatGPT.

The biggest (and most annoying) one I found was when I asked ChatGPT how to integrate with its own APIs. The answer it gave was wrong. Very wrong. It wasn’t just me who received this answer, but I found many forums with people discussing the very specific ChatGPT response, and how it was wrong.?

The hallucinations meant 2 things:

• I need a person to proofread everything that goes out.?
• It is very dangerous to give AI architectural decisions or high-level lesson design decisions without strong guidance. I.e. make decisions that are difficult to undo.?

Problem: The generic speak of soft-skill training doesn't suit our target audience

OYA has a tough conundrum: Our research and experience shows that most of the language common in the soft skills learning and development industry doesn't make an impact on our audience. We also run up against a ground-level culture that can be highly dismissive of soft skills training if the wrong language is used.

Our testing with users (both current and potential) showed two major problems:

• We would have to train it to speak in a tone and style that would be read and not dismissed. We've had to invest time to build our own training material to train ChatGPT. Luckily, using Make enables us to move quickly, adjusting material as needed.
• We couldn't let it make high-level decisions. It just came out as generic and aimed at a generic audience, not our highly targeted audience. We tried to train it but failed to get around this issue.

Many marketing people, especially content creators, have jumped on ChatGPT to make their life simpler. It just means there is more crap out there. More clickbait.

That is not what our users want. They are educated professionals who are logical and technical. They want facts, figures and diagrams.

The long-term for OYA:

So what does all this mean? What is it changing today?

• Restructuring how we manage our content. We are hoping to speed up iteration cycles and fast-track creating personalised content.?
• Challenge ourselves on our content: We are not a like/share-driven company. We are a "make meaningful change" company. We want to spend more time challenging ourselves on our content. That means automating basic tasks. ChatGPT helps build skeleton material, which we then tweak. We’ve found that it is bad at structural/ big vision stuff, so we provide that, and it gets us going.
• Be on the cutting edge of this technology and how it impacts the learning and development world. We want to “add something meaningful to the conversation”.?I am personally committing to showcasing more of the work we are doing on this topic, but including both the successes and failures.

What are the next steps for OYA?

So where to now for OYA? As per many startups, every day is a constant battle. Using AI was always our goal at OYA, and the technology is catching up with our idea of customisable soft skill training for tech teams.?

We are listening to our clients. People want AI involved but are not ready to hand over control. We are seeing more requests for human-to-human coaching. We are finding that while AI is growing in popularity, many people do not know where to start or how to start. There is fear. There is also excitement.?

In line with our ‘embrace innovation’ strategy, we are adjusting our services to match our client's needs.

For now, we are focused on demonstrating our Product Market Fit (PMF). But that is another story for another time.

It's a constant battle. ?

A long-term market trend I am watching

Long term, one of the biggest trends we are watching is how people respond to AI in general.?

We are also looking at industry specific trends. e.g. How comfortable are you taking coaching from an AI? Most of the AI coaching tools out there right now are sub-par, with limited features. Even if you could develop an amazing professional coaching AI, would people use it?

It may be easier in the tech industry where most people are already pretty used to and comfortable with new technology, however there are still some challenges we could foresee.

The reality of today is that ChatGPT needs an editor. You cannot trust it to generate the text you need. It will take a lot of work and training to get it to the level we need. However, it can still hallucinate, so you need to be careful.?

Chatbots, even the most advanced ones, also struggle with topics like sentiment and emotion. I’ve been hearing that one of the biggest challenges currently facing AI is taking a transcript of a meeting and asking it to explain the sentiment and positions of individuals in a meeting.?note: They can take amazing notes and create summaries. It can be a huge time saver.

Chatbots have already replaced many jobs. Estimates say that up to 300m jobs will be displaced by AI.?Many more will spring up in their place.

We've discovered that there is one thing AI can not replace.?

AI is not a person and Chat-Bots are not people. While they can say the right things at the right times, human-to-human interaction will always be important. Ironically many people need help with those skills. There is also a certain irony of using a bot to teach us about how to interact with other humans. Ultimately, AI is a tool. AI is not a human replacement.?

Our research at OYA has shown that simply using a chatbot to teach soft skills does not move the dial on its own. It needs a number of other devices to help, such as socialisation and team learning.?It was why I wrote an article about how AI is not a great professional development coach.

Individuals trying to change the culture on their own rarely succeed. They need others to buy in. Other people in the same team, department or company need to learn the same material, then talk about it. OYA isn’t the end-to-end conversation. OYA gets it started and keeps it moving.

Conclusion:?

Running a start-up is difficult. There are many challenges, and you need to be ready to roll with them as they come. At OYA, we encourage our clients to embrace innovation, and we strongly believe you should practise what you preach.

It wasn't easy, but nothing in life worth doing ever is.