Fixing AI has now come for one of the most prolific inter-office communication programs in the world. Je Slack, owned by Salesforce, will soon be allow your already particularly robotic colleagues to use ChatGPT to write replies and comments. The real test will be trying to figure out if the boss you only occasionally hear about was actually just an AI-powered robot all along.
For anyone who uses Slack to communicate within their company, like we do here at Gizmodo, you’ll soon be able to write a response to colleagues using ChatGPT. As if any of us could really escape it, Slack users can also access the built-in ChatGPT app to summarize chats or search for outside information right within the app. Clicking the three-dot icon in a thread and selecting “Summarize Thread” or “Draft Reply” will display a reply that is only visible to the user. You can then make the response or summary public to people inside the company channel.
Salesforce said Slack ChatGPT will be available for download in the Slack App Directory. A beta waiting list is available here.
Slack users can type “@Einstein,” the name of the Salesforce AI, to have it list recent news or other external information relevant to the business. Still, this is all pretty mundane when it comes to AI integration. Salesforce staff told a digital press conference that ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, was itself the first to implement its now-famous GPT system on the company’s chat service. It’s not clear if Salesforce uses OpenAI’s New API Blueprint or other agreement. OpenAI promised not to use company data– and by extension user data – for its own data set, but Salesforce did not answer Gizmodo’s question whether user data is fed into ChatGPT’s system.
The platform allows companies to integrate other third-party AI systems into its cloud software, but OpenAI is “out-of-the-box” content, according to Salesforce. Based on the company’s demo, this new EinsteinGPT is being integrated into its sales system. It allows companies and salespeople to tell ‘Einstein’s assistant’ to write those really emotionally quiet commercials or sales emails that anyone working in a public-facing company has seen a million times before.
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The company has been using its proprietary Einstein model since 2016 to power sales forecasting, customer support services and, of course, its ad targeting features. Now that it’s adding modern AI models to the mix, you can expect to see a host of companies jumping at the chance to use AI-powered customer support bots.
According to the Salesforce demo, the new EinsteinGPT allows more users of the Salesforce software suite to access an Einstein customer support chatbot. This can incorporate outside information from OpenAI’s training model as well as internal company data. In the case illustrated above, a real person is still needed to verify and possibly modify support responses.
Of course, research shows most customers hate support chatbots, especially those that do not specify that they are software. Yet humans are being left behind in digital customer support. Meta recently made it a subscription perk to have access to a real human for any problem on its platforms.
Salesforce’s general manager of its cloud service, Clara Shih, has regularly quoted Ben Parker as saying “with great power comes great responsibility,” referring to how AI can often go off the rails Or quote inaccurate information. She said the company protects corporate and personally-identifying data and has built “ethical safeguards” into the EinsteinGPT.
Like with SO a lot instances of the AI implementation, we’ll just have to wait and see how well those guardrails really hold up.