Thinking About Organizational Change with ChatGPT

Recent weeks have brought the release of ChatGPT 4 with a host of new capabilities, including better creativity and longer post capability. These enable collaboration on technical writing, screenplays, and learning an author’s writing style. This capability builds on the fact that ChatGPT is constantly learning based on how users interact to enrich its models and engagement style.

This rapid pace of innovation is not specific to ChatGPT but to the entire generative AI domain. This speed of capability availability will drive a fundamental realignment of our organizations, refining business processes and requirements to up-skill both technology and non-technology workers. This change will not only alter how we train current employees but what skills and experience we look for in our hiring processes.

Our next focus as leaders in the AI space will be effectively deploying these capabilities for our organization. After we have defined our organizational policies for using ChatGPT and similar tools, we can build skills, processes, and structures to effectively leverage these tools’ advantages.

First – we must identify our business processes that will see a positive impact by the application of generative AI:

• Business processes that generate content should be our first priority for applying generative AI capabilities. This includes technical writing, marketing content production, and internal communications content.
• Business processes that require multiple people to generate content are a vital area of focus. Generative AI brings much broader knowledge bases to limit the number of subject matter experts necessary to create impactful content.

Second – we must implement processes to ensure the accuracy of our produced content:

• Even generative AI-produced content should follow our existing policies for review and approval. We should not shorten our review process just because the content was auto-generated.
• In addition to reviewing for accuracy, corporate tone and key messages, we must ensure the generated content does not leak non-public information that may be part of the generative models.
• We must ensure a high level of rigour in reviewing for accuracy to ensure company trust is not impacted when these tools are utilized.

Third – we must identify roles that will be displaced and identify upskilling we can provide for our teams to utilize these new tools and shift their focus to other aspects of value generation:

• We must identify the roles that will see the most displacement by this technology. This includes technical writers, software engineers, customer support, and marketing content teams.
• For each of these displaced roles, we can identify the activities of their new role augmented with these capabilities.
• We should establish training programs to enable these individuals to understand and engage in training and development to move to new roles within the organization.
• We must empathize with all impacted staff; seeing your job erode due to technology is a scary time, and we owe our employees investment, skills and a sympathetic ear during this time.

Fourth – we must invest in this technology and test it regularly to continue the improvement of our business processes and training programs to take advantage of newly released capabilities:

• This technology has the potential to advance faster than any previous tool we deployed in our enterprises. We must match this with an investment in ongoing testing, exploration and evaluation of new features as soon as they are released.
• Our team will be utilizing these technologies in their personal life, which will spur ideas on how to apply them within their job. We want to capture that passion and creativity and bring new technologies to their position as soon as viable. Give employees a path to suggest ways to apply these exciting capabilities in their careers.
• Identify the level of risk to your own organization based on the intellectual property you create and manage. Use that risk to identify which deployment method of these technologies is right for you. In addition to the SaaS models used by ChatGPT, we are beginning to see vendors such as Databricks release their own clones that can be deployed internally and trained on internal and proprietary data.

Generative AI will be a game changer for many organizations, bringing much higher efficiency to content creation. With it comes risks to our staff being displaced, inaccurate data and the leaks of intellectual properties. As companies have invested resources in business intelligence, data warehousing and collaboration – we now create a new domain of organizational transformation. The organizations that invest in generative AI and set up the necessary structures to use it effectively will see the most positive returns.