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GENERATIVE AI IN ENTERPRISE

Generative AI has advanced rapidly in recent years, enabling exciting and diverse developments and applications across various industries. The last year especially has seen a big leap in the AI hype curve. From marketing, finance and education, to gaming, social media and even space travel, the possibilities of generative AI seem endless. Here, we explore some of the best publicly available use cases for generative AI, showcasing how the technology is transforming many different services and sectors.

Find out more about the big changes on the way at the Generative AI Week.

NASA unveils 'alien' AI-designed structures

The truth is out there – NASA has discovered alien technology. Well, in a sense.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland has been utilizing commercially available AI software to design specialized components – known as "evolved structures" – for their missions. These structures possess a distinctive and unconventional appearance – or as NASA research engineer Ryan McClelland puts it: “They look somewhat alien and weird.”

However, it’s not just the way they look that sets them apart; according to NASA, the one-off parts weigh less, tolerate higher structural loads and are developed in a fraction of the time it takes humans to do the same work.

The design process begins by analyzing specific requirements of each mission. A computer-assisted design specialist maps out the connections between the component and the spacecraft or instrument, and then the AI software takes over, generating intricate and complex structural designs in short time frames.

While the algorithms play a significant role in the development, human oversight and intuition remains essential, says McClelland, who admits that the algorithm occasionally produces structures that are excessively thin.

However, the engineer emphasizes that analyses have demonstrated the algorithm-generated parts to have much lower stress concentrations compared to those produced by humans, contributing to a significant reduction in the risk of failure.

What’s more, the streamlined development process allows designers to allocate more time to other critical aspects of the mission.

The evolved structures have already found applications in several NASA missions, including the EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE) project, which employs a balloon-borne telescope for studying exoplanets with characteristics similar to hot Jupiters in orbit around distant stars.

Coca-Cola creation platform quenches thirst for AI

A Coca-Cola collaboration with OpenAI and Bain & Company has seen the development of an AI platform called ‘Create Real Magic’, which effectively opens up the Coca-Cola marketing archives to the public for the creation of original artwork.

This platform combines the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 for the generation of human-like text, and DALL-E for the creation of images based on text.

Digital creatives can produce a canvas for their AI-powered artistic experiments by using a variety of Coca-Cola branded elements – such as the famous script logo, the contour bottle and storied symbols from Coke advertising campaigns.

Artists have also been invited to enter their work into a contest, with the chance of having their art featured on Coca-Cola's digital billboards in Times Square, New York, and Piccadilly Circus, London.

“We will begin to leverage OpenAI’s technology in our marketing function to reimagine how we produce creative content, increasing the velocity from weeks to days,” says Manolo Arroyo, Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer.

“We see many applications of AI – including content creation and rapid iteration, hyper-personalizing content and messaging for consumers and customers, and driving two-way conversations with consumers,” he adds.

Coca-Cola is also exploring ways to leverage AI beyond marketing, in areas such as internal knowledge management and workflows, customer service and ordering, and point-of-sale material creation in collaboration.

Decades of data helps to create Bloomberg GPT

In March 2023, Bloomberg released a research paper on its development of a generative AI tool known as BloombergGPT.

Trained on Bloomberg’s massive datasets, BloombergGPT is a large language model (LLM) developed to support a range of natural language processing (NLP) research and analysis tasks within the financial industry, including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification and question answering. It also enables Bloomberg to harness the huge amount of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal, which has been the go-to financial market data resource for traders over the last 40 years or more.

The company’s machine learning (ML) product and research group collaborated with the AI engineering team to combine financial language documents from Bloomberg's extensive archive with public data. The resulting training dataset was used to develop the 50-billion parameter decoder-only causal language model.

According to Bloomberg, the model outperforms existing open models of similar size on financial tasks while performing on par or better on general NLP benchmarks.

“The quality of machine learning and NLP models comes down to the data you put into them,” says Gideon Mann, head of Bloomberg’s ML product and research team.

“Thanks to the collection of financial documents Bloomberg has curated over four decades, we were able to carefully create a large and clean, domain-specific dataset to train an LLM that is best suited for financial use cases.”

Microsoft’s Bing turns to ChatGPT to find an edge

In the battle for search engine dominance, Google has been the historic victor, but earlier this year Microsoft unleashed a weapon to mount a serious fightback.

In February 2023, the tech giant unveiled its AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser. The AI technology comes courtesy of ChatGPT – which is not surprising considering that Microsoft invested an estimated $10bn in OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, in January.

However, there are differences between using ChatGPT – which was released to the public in November 2022 – and AI-powered Bing. For example, the publicly available version of ChatGPT works on GPT-3.5 and is trained on web data from before 2021, while Bing AI works using GPT-4 and, of course, references the current web in its entirety. Also, Microsoft says its proprietary Prometheus model optimizes the OpenAI model, and claims that this results in more relevant and targeted search results.

Moreover, Microsoft’s aim is to offer an integrated experience that combines search, browsing and chat functionalities.

The enhanced Bing search engine incorporates an interactive chat, allowing users to refine their searches by asking for more details. In addition, the new Bing can generate content, helping with tasks like writing emails, creating travel itineraries or preparing for job interviews.

The Edge browser, meanwhile, has been updated with AI capabilities, introducing features like Chat and Compose. Users can request summaries of lengthy reports or ask for assistance in composing content for social posts, for example.

As you might expect, Google isn’t a mere spectator when it comes to generative AI and is investing heavily in its own development, known as Bard.

LinkedIn opens up to OpenAI

Another Microsoft-owned platform, LinkedIn, is also taking advantage of advanced OpenAI GPT models, including GPT-4, to enhance user experience. Tools offer a range of features, such as generative AI-powered collaborative articles, personalized writing suggestions, and AI-generated marketing copy.

The collaborative articles feature begins with AI-powered conversation starters crafted by LinkedIn's editorial team. Leveraging the platform's Skills Graph, each article is then matched with relevant member experts who can contribute their lessons, anecdotes and advice based on their professional experience.

Another feature, personalized writing suggestions, allows users to receive tailored copy advice based on their existing content. By analyzing the user's skills and experiences, the AI tool suggests the most important information to highlight in the ‘about’ and ‘headline’ sections of their profile.

The latest feature, announced in June 2023, offers AI-generated copy with the aim of increasing marketing efficiency. These suggestions utilize data from users' LinkedIn Page and Campaign Manager settings to provide five ad headlines and copy recommendations, which the user can then select from and tweak.

Initially, the new feature is being tested in English with a select group of customers in North America. However, LinkedIn has plans to expand its functionality, supporting additional languages and making it available to a wider user base.

Writer to the rescue for HubSpot designers

When inbound sales and marketing software developer HubSpot wanted to enable its product and content designers to hit new heights with their UX writing, the company turned to Writer – an LLM-based generative AI platform that uses ML and NLP to tackle a range of writing tasks.

HubSpot’s aim was to make UX writing more consistent across the company’s product, as well as increase quality and speed up processes.

“We wanted a centralized and structured database of terminology that was important to us, so that we could work with our localization team, because defining terms in a more standardized way helps enable the best and highest quality translation,” explains Jonathon Colman, HubSpot senior design manager and content design practice co-lead.

According to Colman, before the partnership with Writer, HubSpot relied on “just a heap of disconnected spreadsheets and documents where we had defined terms and styles”. But now, the AI platform has allowed everything to be centralized in one place.

“Writer has taken what was this really chaotic landscape of just disconnected, disorganized things and made it all systematic. So everyone can move a lot faster, a lot better together.”

While Writer has improved organisation and the quality of writing, the HubSpot product designers are also now more confident in approaching UX writing tasks, Colman adds. What's more, time savings have allowed them to redirect their efforts towards more strategic work, such as customer journey mapping, improving accessibility and new product launches.

“That’s a much better use of their time than going into a wiki or a static document somewhere and rifling through a bunch of standards,” says Colman.

Expedia travels down the ChatGPT path

Travel giant Expedia is another company linking up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to enhance customer experience.

April 2023 saw the beta launch of the Expedia travel app, allowing users to engage in open-ended conversations and receive recommendations for travel destinations, accommodation, transport and activities.

The intelligent shopping feature automatically saves hotels discussed in the conversation to a ‘trip’ in the app. The feature is designed to help users organize effectively when selecting dates, checking availability and adding flights, cars or activities.

Expedia has already leveraged AI and machine learning (ML) across its platform with personalized trip options generated using algorithms that consider various variables, such as hotel location, room type, date ranges and price points. In addition, Expedia's price tracking feature utilizes comprehensive flight data, AI and ML to compare current flight prices with historical trends.

An AI-powered virtual agent is also available 24/7 to assist travelers with unexpected trip changes.

"By integrating ChatGPT into the Expedia app and combining it with our other AI-based shopping capabilities, like hotel comparison, price tracking for flights and trip collaboration tools, we can now offer travelers an even more intuitive way to build their perfect trip,” says Peter Kern, vice chairman and CEO of the Expedia Group.

According to the company, the beta testing phase will allow it to refine the experience based on user feedback.

Kern told CBS News: "We built our own AI to basically monitor the outcomes for what ChatGPT comes back with because, really, we only want to help people shop for travel. We are really using our own capabilities to monitor the outcomes, make sure travelers don't get strange responses. And if something goes wrong, we're trying to make sure it comes back to travel."

A new kind of language model for Duolingo

Language learning platform Duolingo recently collaborated with OpenAI to integrate GPT-4 into a new subscription tier called Duolingo Max. The upgraded tier provides learners with two new features: Explain My Answer and Roleplay.

Explain My Answer allows learners to engage in a chat with ‘Duo’, the Duolingo mascot, in which they can receive explanations on why their answers were correct or incorrect, seek further clarification and request examples.

Roleplay, meanwhile, enables learners to practice conversations in real-world scenarios with virtual characters. Following the conversation, Duo can give learners feedback regarding the accuracy and complexity of their responses, as well as offer tips for future conversations.

The initial launch of Duolingo Max covered Spanish and French courses for English speakers on iOS devices, with availability in the US, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

“Artificial intelligence has always been a huge part of our strategy,” says principal product manager Edwin Bodge. “We had been using it for personalizing lessons and running Duolingo English tests. But there were gaps in a learner’s journey that we wanted to fill: conversation practice, and contextual feedback on mistakes.”

Robolox building towards a generative AI ecosystem

Roblox, the game platform known for its immersive 3D experiences, has signaled its intention to “revolutionize creation” through generative AI.

Currently, creators on Roblox use Roblox Studio, a free platform, to build their experiences and publish them across various platforms. However, Roblox says it is building a platform utilizing AI tools that will “enable every user to be a creator – not just those comfortable with Roblox Studio and other 3D content creation tools”.

Roblox plans to introduce tests for two new tools in the near future: generative AI text prompts and generative AI code completion. According to the plans, the tools will enable creators to develop integrated 3D objects with built-in behavior. For example, a creator will be able to design a car by describing its attributes, and generative AI will do the rest.

The ambition is for tools utilizing voice, touch-based gestures and other intuitive interfaces to be available to users in the future. Roblox also wants the AI community to contribute; the ambition is to foster an “ecosystem” where third-party AI creation services integrate directly into the platform.

When announcing the plans, Roblox acknowledged the importance of implementing generative AI “thoughtfully and ethically”. The company also emphasized that safety, moderation and the economic aspects of the platform would need to be carefully addressed.

Find out more about the big changes on the way at the Generative AI Week.

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