Editor’s Note: Rajeev Kapur is chief executive of 1105 Media Inc., an Irvine-based provider of B2B marketing with more than 100 employees. What follows are excerpts from his newest book: “AI Made Simple: A Beginner’s Guide to Generative Intelligence,” which Amazon currently ranks No. 1 in Artificial Intelligence Expert Systems, No. 2 in Computers & Technology Teaching & Reference and No. 9 in Business Technology Innovation. The Business Journal’s annual list of the largest chipmakers in Orange County begins on page 16.
Generative AI isn’t just hype; it’s the opening shot in a major revolution.
In December 2022, OpenAI launched its free preview of ChatGPT, a new chatbot powered by the new GPT-3 language model. Within its first five days of opening, ChatGPT received over 1 million sign-ups—reaching that mark 250 times faster than Netflix. By January 2023, it had amassed 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
By 2025, 10% of all data produced globally will be from Generative AI.
It’s not without problems. The dataset that underpins GPT-3 comes mostly from the internet—which, as you might have experienced for yourself, sometimes passes off misinformation or opinion as truth.
It has been misused. One weekend in May 2023, a new song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” billed as a new collaboration between the popular rapper Drake and singer The Weeknd, popped up on TikTok from a brand-new account.
It quickly went viral, racking up millions of views and suddenly showing up on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services. Whoever posted the song on TikTok suddenly began offering downloads of the song if users followed a link that asked them to provide their phone number.
The link led to a page of a company that specializes in mass texting marketing! The entire song, it turned out, was a creation of Generative AI. And just as suddenly, it was taken down from all those services.
There is now an ad agency that creates ads almost completely without any people involved, thanks to Generative AI. Adthos is a startup with a startling new business model based on a platform that uses Generative AI to create not just scripts for audio ads, but also to produce those audio ads for use in podcasts, radio, and other audio only media, by making available music, sound effects and, to cap it all off, incredible simulations of hundreds of recognizable voice actors that Adthos has under contract for this very purpose.
AI Plug-Ins
New Generative AI plug-ins (which are like apps on your phone) are being developed daily. Executives should be aware of what is now available or soon to be available. What follows are AI apps that businesses might find useful:
• Ellie is all about email. Specifically, it can help you craft messages and replies that tap into your own voice and make it sound like you wrote it yourself. It “learns” your individual writing style and allows you to choose a “mood” for your message. You can sound casual or professional … or irritated! Ellie is also multilingual and will reply to an email in the language it was written in. Available at tryellie.com.
• Tired of arguing about what was actually said at a meeting? Fireflies is an app that allows you to record the entire get-together—and then it automatically transcribes the proceedings, even if they take place through Zoom or Google Meet. What’s also cool about this app is that teams can easily search through the meeting transcriptions to find relevant information when needed. The app is already in use by such high-profile companies as Netflix, Uber and Nike. Available at fireflies.ai.
• Maybe you don’t have the greatest voice in the world, and you’d like to have a more professional one narrating a project. That’s the AI miracle Murf delivers. Murf has a library of what it terms “lifelike voices” to choose from—there are over 120 voice styles available on the site, including more than 20 languages and accent options. After you’ve decided on the voice you want from their library, you can then upload the script you want and have it “read” in the style you want it delivered. Then, in the Murf Studio, you can designate what kind of project the narration is meant to be a part of. Options include audio books, e-learning modules, ads, podcasts, presentations, and articles. Available at murf.ai.
• GhostWryter, which is focused solely on Google docs, allows you to use AI to write SEO texts, blog posts, and other marketing content within seconds. GhostWryter also offers a starter guide on how to use things like keywords, idea generators, and outline generators to write everything from headlines and paragraphs to full essays. Available at ghostwryter.net.
• HeyGen is an AI solution that allows you to create AI-created videos at scale. You can easily produce high-quality videos with AI-generated avatars and voices. Available at www.heygen.com
• Wordtune will examine a document and provide you with a quick summary of its contents. Once the platform scans through a document or article, it then instantly highlights the most relevant information and adds short summaries to be displayed next to each passage. It can even provide different summaries based on a specific point of view—for instance what the text means for an overall industry or decision-makers within the field. Available at www.wordtune.com.
• Regie AI will help research potential contacts and help sales agents create personal emails that feel authentic to your company. Regie can also create sales sequences and publish them to the company’s sales platform. Available at Regie.Ai.
Copilot
Microsoft, which owns 49% of ChatGPT, is rolling out several apps for businesses.
Copilot is being integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day to unleash creativity and unlock productivity and uplevel skills. With Copilot, you will be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook, and more collaborative in Teams.
You will also be able to take advantage of a new feature called Business Chat, which works across Microsoft 365 apps and your company’s data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we are doing with our product offering,” and it will generate a status update based on meetings, emails, and chat threads.
So far, the data shows that among developers who have used Copilot, 88% say they are more productive, 77% say the tool helps them spend less time searching for information, and 74% say they can focus their efforts on more satisfying work.
With Copilot in PowerPoint, you’ll be able to turn your ideas into striking presentations. It will be able to transform existing written documents into decks complete with speaker notes and sources or start a new presentation from a simple prompt or outline.
Microsoft’s Designer uses prompts to create graphics, including for social media posts, invitations, posters, and so forth, using cutting-edge Generative AI technology.
Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI is being used by CarMax, the national used car dealer, to create customer review summaries for 5,000 car pages in just a few months—an accomplishment that would have taken 11 years manually. Microsoft Viva Sales is designed to help businesses with their sales efforts combines customer relationship management data with Microsoft 365 data to deliver real-time insights and automatic content creation.
An interesting new feature that just launched is OpenAI’s GPT Store. Like an app store, the GPT Store is where corporations can upload their own GPTs and browse trending GPTs in categories like research, education and lifestyle.
