We recently sat down with Pete Reilly, AnswerRocket Co-Founder and COO to discuss the emergence of ChatGPT and how it generated a groundswell of AI adoption among the masses. With AI now available to everyone, more business leaders are being pushed to consider how to utilize ChatGPT within their own organizations.
One application is utilizing the AI powered chatbot in tandem with an augmented analytics platform to create a true conversational analytics tool. With large language models working behind the scenes, it’s now easier than ever to get valuable insights in plain English. The implications of such an advancement are huge. Barriers to access insights are removed as data becomes truly democratized within an organization.
Pete gives his take on the recent leaps in AI in the interview transcript below.
Question: How has ChatGPT shifted people’s mindset about AI?
Pete Reilly:
Prior to ChatGPT, I don’t think the person on the street thought about AI a whole lot, unless you were a data scientist or maybe a CIO or something like that. There was maybe some vague awareness that there’s AI going on around, I don’t know, recommending my next Netflix movie or Spotify song or something like that. That was about it. It felt like it was in the realm of academics and high tech companies.
Even OpenAI and GPT themselves have been around for a while. I mean, GPT-3 had been around for a year and a half before ChatGPT existed. ChatGPT, because it was free, because it was widely accessible, and because it just felt like magic. I mean, I think everybody got their hands on this thing within a couple of days. You couldn’t go to a party and not have somebody come up to you and say, oh, have you played with ChatGPT or have you used it?
It just made it super accessible, it made it feel like magic, and it became the topic.
Question: How can LLMs like ChatGPT improve the analytics experience?
Pete Reilly:
The possibilities are endless. I think in the short run, AnswerRocket was built from day one with this idea that it was hard to access data and it was hard to build dashboards and so on, and that the common business person just didn’t have time to learn those new things.
The original concept behind AnswerRocket at the very beginning was to create this assistant that could help the business person understand what was going on in their business and help them understand key insights from their data. All the way from asking questions to get the trend of sales, or get momentum, or understand what the drivers of market share were and so on.
The first order of things I would say is it becomes much easier to ask those questions leveraging a large language model. It doesn’t have to be GPT, by the way. There could be other language models that make sense, number one.
Number two, we spent a lot of time over the years generating insights, generating text that’s describing to the business person what’s going on in addition to a chart or a graph. I think large language models will make that much more robust. It will give us additional capabilities around multi-language that have been traditionally very hard, that become much simpler with this technology.
I think over time you’re going to see this blending together of what we’ve been talking about which is much more accessing, structured data, but 80% of the data inside of organizations is unstructured. I think this really opens the door to making that much more accessible to the business person as well.
I think the next three to five years in this space are going to be amazing in terms of the capability that we can then bring to humans to make data much more accessible, to make analysis much more accessible and insights more accessible that folks can use to make their business better.
Question: What industries should consider using ChatGPT?
Pete Reilly:
I can’t think of an industry that’s not going to be impacted by this technology, anything from shipping transportation to education to pharmaceuticals. I mean, you can think of use cases pretty quickly, even as a layperson in every one of those industries. It just seems like AI just had its iPhone moment and it feels like that, and it feels like a pretty big capability and leap forward that if you’re an organization that’s not looking at this and taking advantage, it just feels like you’re going to be left behind.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, ChatGPT has revolutionized the way we use AI technology by making it accessible to anyone. In the analytics space, the possibilities are endless, as large language models like ChatGPT make it so easy to ask questions and generate insights. With powerful tools like this coming out all the time, businesses need to stay ahead of the curve and prepare for the inevitable changes that will come their way. Now more than ever, business owners are tasked with staying up to date on emerging technologies in order to take advantage of them before their competitors do. All in all, ChatGPT has made AI technology more accessible and given businesses a path towards greater success through intelligent analytics.
