Unleash the power of ChatGPT to revolutionise your EX

Our latest EX Space webinar took place today and focused on the potential for generative AI and, specifically, ChatGPT to revolutionise employee experience. It was one of our most popular sessions to date, with nearly 200 people signed up - clearly the subject of the moment! ?

Our aim was to explore some of the ways that ChatPGT can support us as people practitioners and also empower ordinary employees.?Over the course of 60 minutes we looked at what ChatGPT is, what it can be used for and how to get the most out of it, with a particular focus on prompt engineering.?

We started the session with a quote from the new head of the UK’s AI task force, Ian Hogarth, who recently said: “The whole world is going to have to rethink the way in which people work.”?As scene-setters go, it doesn’t get much bigger than that! Make no mistake, if it hasn’t already, generative AI is going to rock your world.?

So what is it?

Chat GPT or, to give it it’s full name, Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (slightly dystopian I know, Optimus Prime anyone?!) is a natural language model developed by OpenAI. It’s purpose is to generate human-like responses to natural language prompts - it’s one of a number of tools classed as generative AI.?Put simply, that means you can ask it normal everyday questions and it will respond with something sensible.?It has been trained on vast amounts of text data from the internet (but only up to 2021). As such it’s a hugely knowledgeable and intelligent virtual assistant which can help you do certain things better, faster and generally be more productive.?

In terms of how to use it, the sky really is the limit. During the session we explored two perspectives on this, thinking about use cases as an EX practitioner and as an employee.?

For those of us in EX-focused roles - and we’ll extend that to related disciplines like HR and Internal Comms - ChatGPT can be a powerful copilot (and all credit to Microsoft for choosing this name for its upcoming ChatGPT add-on for the Microsoft 365 suite!) As a virtual personal assistant, ChatGPT can carry out a variety of time consuming tasks at lightning speed. Here’s just a few of them:?

• Write sub headings for a lengthy piece of text?
• come up with headlines?
• proof read, rewrite and edit?
• come up with interview questions?
• summarise key points?
• create images?
• analyse survey data and text?
• translate into other languages?
• write job descriptions?
• curate learning resources?

But it’s much more than a writing assistant and there are a growing number of ChatGPT-powered tools out there that can do even more (check out the presentation tool Gamma and the visual AI tool Midjourney!)

When you think about this from the employee perspective, the options are no less impressive.?And this is just the start. Once this technology is baked into our internal systems at work, it opens up a world of possibility in terms of self service, on tap help and support, personalisation of content, improved learning and knowledge management, analytics, enhanced accessibility and so much more.?

Even now, according to one recent US study, employees using ChatGPT are on average 30-50% more productive than those who aren’t.?That’s quite a number.?

Mastering the art of prompt engineering

We then turned our attention to prompt engineering, the process of creating and refining prompts in a specific way so that ChatGPT gives you the best possible answer. Prompts take many forms - they can be messages, statements, questions, instructions or other text-based inputs. Emma shared a number of ‘before’ and ‘after’ examples to demonstrate the impact of prompt engineering, before sharing a framework for refining your prompts, as well as best practice tips. ?

We explored the EX landscape and looked at how ChatGPT can support different parts of it, from writing policies, designing learning interventions and analysing data and setting objectives, through to drafting comms, storytelling and training.?

But tread with caution!?

We also discussed the need to be cautious with how and when you use ChatGPT. Confidentially is particularly important and, as a public, web-based tool, this is definitely not the place to upload confidential or personal information. Turning to some other risks and dangers, we also talked about how ChatGPT can hallucinate and make stuff up to fill in the gaps - and how it isn’t capable of understanding whether an answer it gives is right, wrong, harmful or ridiculous.?This is where the human element comes in - powerful as generative AI clearly is, it still need a human to sense check and fine tune its output. Remember, AI can’t do human empathy. At least not yet.?

All in all, we were left with a sense that ChatGPT and the other tools it already powers are game changers in so many ways - this is going to be bigger than any of us can imagine, so it makes sense to get stuck in now, experiment and use it to do what you do better or quicker.?The doommongers will no doubt focus on the negatives - quite rightly pointing to the jobs AI will eliminate - but, as Gartner and others have already suggested, Generative AI is likely to create more jobs than it wipes out. At the same time, the potential for this to automate and turbocharge the dull, repetitive, administrative aspects of all sorts of roles is huge - and if that frees up time to focus on more human activity, then that’s got to be a great thing.?Just think of the shackles we could remove from line managers and the positive impact this could have on engagement and experience!?

If you missed out, you'll be able to catch up on the webinar soon - we'll post the link in the comments.

Lee | The EX Space