ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and other public-facing generative AI chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) are nice enough, but they’re general-purpose and not well integrated into enterprise workflows. Employees either have to go to a separate app, or companies have to spend time and effort adding the functionality to their applications via application programming interfaces. Plus, in order to use ChatGPT and other genAI chatbots well, employees have to learn prompt engineering.
Embedded generative AI, by comparison, promises to put the new AI functionality right where employees need it most — into their existing word processing applications, spreadsheets, email clients, and other enterprise productivity software — without any work on the part of their employers. If it’s done right, the new AI functionality should be seamless and intuitive to users, allowing them to get all the benefits without genAI’s steep learning curve.
Based on a recent survey of technology decision-makers in North America and the UK, Forrester predicts that by 2025, nearly all enterprises will be using generative AI for communications support, including writing and editing. In fact, 70% of the survey respondents said they were already using generative AI for most or all of their writing or editing.
But according to Forrester, standalone genAI tools — like ChatGPT — can’t support cross-functional collaboration and don’t work where employees work. “That means that for many use cases, genAI will be more beneficial as an embedded functionality than as a standalone app,” the firm said in the survey report.
Manish Goyal, global AI and analytics leader for IBM Consulting, agrees. “You can have all the best AI, but if it’s not in the workflow where people use it, it’s not going to get adoption,” he said.
The biggest buzz in embedded genAI has been around Microsoft 365 Copilot, a generative AI assistant being built into apps across the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Although some genAI capabilities have been rolled out to Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps, Copilot itself is not yet generally available, with only 600 companies allowed early access for testing purposes.
David McCurdy, chief enterprise architect and CTO at solutions integrator Insight, is eagerly awaiting the general release of Microsoft 365 Copilot. “For people who’ve seen the demos, the integration of generative AI is going to completely change how back-office work is done,” he said.
In the meantime, some enterprises are adding generative AI to their apps themselves, via API calls to OpenAI or locally run LLMs like Llama 2. Insight, for example, embedded generative AI into Microsoft Excel via APIs. “But we don’t want to do too much development, because Office 365 is going to have it,” McCurdy said.
Even companies without the time or people needed to create their own AI embeds can start using generative AI within their productivity tools…
2023-09-19 07:24:03
Post from www.computerworld.com rnrn