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By Kevin O'Keefe, LexBlog CEO & Founder

How Companies Are Benefiting By Employees Experimenting With ChatGPT

February 20, 2023

Is everyone in your law firm or company, experimenting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT? Especially your leaders.

In an article this morning, The Wall Street Journal makes a strong case they should be.

Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of the online education company, Coursera, began using OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November to see if it could save him time.

The outcome: 

“I spend way more time think­ing and way less time writ­ing (correspondence and notes). I don’t want to be the one who doesn’t use it, be­cause some­one who is us­ing it is go­ing to have a lot of ad­vantages.”

He’s not alone.

“At the Ok­la­homa head­quar­ters of driller Devon Energy, lead­er­ship grew ex­cited about Chat­GPT af­ter a group of tech­ni­cians showed that they could use the tool to test their com­puter code, said Trey Lowe the com­pa­ny’s chief tech­nol-ogy of­fi­cer. The group man­ages the firm’s au­tomation sys­tem, which con­trols equip­ment in oil fields.

Telmo Gomes the co-founder and IT di­rec­tor of Live­Sense, which is based in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia, said Chat­GPT saves him sig­nif­i­cant time on re­search. Af­ter his com­pany was hired to de­velop a sys­tem that can de­tect va­p­ing in pub­lic places, he spent hours call­ing peo­ple and googling to de­ter­mine which sen­sors worked best. In­for­ma­tion was lim­ited; other com­pa­nies sell­ing va­p­ing de­tec­tion so­lu­tions didn’t dis­close what they were us­ing.

Then he typed the ques­tion into Chat­GPT. Within a few sec­onds, it spat back sev­eral an­swers, in­clud­ing ones that ex­actly mir­rored the so­lu­tions he’d set­tled on from his re­search. It also added a note of cau­tion to con­sider the ethics of mon­i­tor­ing peo­ple’s be­hav­iors.

“It com­pletely blew my mind,” Mr. Gomes said. “We’re a small com­pany. It will let us do more with less.””

At the Ok­la­homa head­quar­ters of driller Devon Energy, lead­er­ship grew ex­cited about Chat­GPT af­ter a group of tech­ni­cians showed that they could use the tool to test their com­puter code, said Trey Lowe, the com­pa­ny’s chief tech­nol-ogy of­fi­cer. The group man­ages the firm’s au­tomation sys­tem, which con­trols equip­ment in oil fields…..

Mr. Lowe said the com­pany hopes Chat­GPT will one day be ca­pa­ble of look­ing up aca­d­e­mic repos­i­to­ries and sum­ming up, say, a hun­dred sci­en­tific pa­pers about hy­dro­gen into a con­cise re­port. “For some in­di­vid­u­als, just a sum­mary of it will be 100% ben­e­fi­cial to help­ing them make a de­ci­sion,” he said.”

These companies are not law firms, but their use of ChatGPT demonstrate that efficiency and an improved work product lies in the the use of ChatGPT.

Don’t get caught up in the discussion that GPT is not going to replace what I do. 

GPT is not meant to replace what we do, it’s a tool to assist us. Per the Journal article, 

“AI ex­perts cau­tion, how­ever, that such tools should only be used to sup­port peo­ple who are al­ready ex­perts in their do­main.“
#chatgpt#ai#openai