When Artificial Intelligence Enters Your Workplace

Artificial intelligence chatbots are everywhere. Since the emergence of ChatGPT, they have captured the imagination of the public as well as countless Silicon Valley inventors and investors.

Conversational AI enables computers to process and generate human language, and its astonishing human-like capabilities have sparked expectations of its potential to transform the workplace and enhance productivity.

A school in the UK has appointed an artificial intelligence chatbot as a "headteacher," which may be the world's first. This chatbot is designed to assist students with ADHD and provide advice to staff on formulating school policies.

New Work Assistant

Do not think of your artificial intelligence chatbot as an all-knowing artificial brain, but rather as a genius graduate student assigned as your personal work assistant.

Like an eager graduate student, they work tirelessly and are essentially competent in the tasks assigned to them. However, they can be a bit arrogant. They are always overly confident and may take risky shortcuts, providing answers that sound good but lack any factual basis.

It is wise to always verify the output of the chatbot, just as you would carefully check the work of a graduate student.

Due to their probabilistic nature, they cannot understand your questions in the same way as a human. However, in the appropriate role and when used correctly, chatbots can greatly enhance productivity in language-related tasks.

Using AI Chatbots

The three levels of chatbot functionality can be summarized using the acronym ACE - Assist, Create, Explore.

Assist - Chatbots can help with various writing tasks, such as summarizing, analyzing, and condensing text, or extracting key points and themes. They can express arguments in academic texts in a more easily understandable manner.

Create - Chatbots can generate original text, turning points into business reports or ideas. They can mimic different genres and write in different styles. When encoded with countless texts from various fields, they can be instructed to think from different perspectives, imitating business strategists, scholars, marketers, or journalists, creating content useful for many professions.

Explore - Chatbots can be interesting "discussion partners" when it comes to exploring hypothetical ideas ("What if..."). When exploring new questions, let the chatbot set the question for you and then let it answer. If you want to explore what makes a good project report or social media post, have the chatbot write one and then reflect on why it wrote what it did.

Many workers are concerned that artificial intelligence will be used to replace their jobs. However, given the probabilistic nature of this technology and its inherent lack of reliability, automation is not the most likely application area.

After all, artificial intelligence chatbots may not be here for your job, but they are certainly here for your job description. Fluency in artificial intelligence, the ability to understand and use AI, will soon become essential, similar to using personal computers.