One of the promising uses of a tool like ChatGPT that could be commercialized in the near future is email automation. Microsoft and Salesforce announced new products this week with that feature.
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have been used to write custom emails. This shows that AI tools like ChatGPT could soon play an important role in business. Embracing this trend, Salesforce and Microsoft began offering products with tighter integration between chatbots and their software.
According to CNBC, a TikTok video that went viral recently shows how ChatGPT is integrated with Google Sheets to write custom LinkedIn messages for executives about requesting a meeting. There are about 10 companies and CEOs in a targeted industry, and the tool also generates a different outreach note for each company.
“I think we’re at a very interesting inflection point in terms of how we’re starting to use AI in our day-to-day lives, something that wasn’t easily accessible just six months ago before ChatGPT was ready to go. public”, Alex Klufas, TikTok video creator on how to use ChatGPT to automate email for sales, marketing, or personal connections.
Innovative AI, including large language modeling (LLM) tools like ChatGPT, has led to a boom not only in the tech world but with many users around the world. Now Big Tech and startups are racing to integrate software capable of producing content that resembles what humans would write into their products. Microsoft’s recently announced general AI sales feature could help the company capture market share and add more than $768 million in annual revenue, according to analysts’ estimates.
Products coming to market
An American cloud software company Salesforce on March 7 announced an LLM product called EinsteinGPT, which uses the same model as ChatGPT. It can automatically write marketing emails, an integration that makes sense since Salesforce’s main product is a web app that tracks how often salespeople contact leads.
Microsoft on March 6 said it would integrate ChatGPT-based general AI into a suite of business tools called CoPilot. One of its key features is using AI to generate emails. In a demonstration video, Microsoft shows off a new feature integrated into Outlook mailboxes, users can use this feature to respond to requests or suggest meeting times with customers. CoPilot is in beta testing, but will be released to Microsoft Viva Sales customers on March 15.
Concerned about phishing emails
There is some concern that the email writing capabilities of AI tools like ChatGPT could be abused to spam people. This chatbot can also be used for phishing to get private passwords. “We find mass-targeted spam email indistinguishable from dedicated email,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note this month on the AI industry.
ChatGPT is also prone to “hallucinations” or fabrications. It only predicts the next word or part of a phrase based on statistics and doesn’t know if it’s correct or not. However, Microsoft recently said that it will use data from its software as the basis for correct answers, in addition to a “dislike” button for users to tell the chatbot that it is a question. The answer is not helpful. This helps to train the model to avoid the same mistake in the future.
Even so, the limits of ChatGPT can still be clearly seen in Alex Klufas’ TikTok video. While some of the suggestions are correct, some of the CEOs that ChatGPT recommends for outreach are former CEOs or non-executives at the company. “I think anyone who uses this technology, especially when it’s new, has to do due diligence,” Klufas said.