Author: Ignacio Robles, Architect
Whether from watching the news or checking your favorite social media feed, you have probably heard about all the new AI platforms that are becoming available to the public. Artificial Intelligence isn’t a new technology, but its ease and accessibility are transforming how we interact with the Internet. Much like social media or the iPhone, this technology is poised to change how we view the world and how we approach work.
Let’s take a look at the most recent AI platform to take the world by storm: ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT seems to be on everyone’s mind lately, but what is it?
Developed by OpenAI, the free demo version of this artificial intelligence language model was launched in November 2022. Its purpose? To converse with people and respond to their queries, providing relevant and informative answers based on the data that was used to train it.
As part of its training, ChatGPT was fed a massive amount of text data, including books, articles, and websites, allowing it to understand a wide range of topics and provide information on everything from science and technology to history, literature, and philosophy.
How does it work with Salesforce?
As a language model, ChatGPT can be integrated with Salesforce to provide various services. Here are just a few it’s capable of rendering:
- Slack: Enhances collaboration. Salesforce’s new ChatGPT app for Slack can surface information in Slack from Salesforce, allowing for enhanced collaboration. Its features include generating replies to team members, summarizing the activity in channels or threads, and even searching for information directly from Slack.
- Chatbots: Provides instant customer support when integrated with Salesforce’s chatbot functionality. By leveraging natural language-processing capabilities, ChatGPT can understand the intent behind a user’s message and either provide relevant responses or escalate the query to a human agent (if necessary).
- Automated Responses: Skillfully generates automatic responses to customer queries, such as email inquiries or social media messages. By analyzing the message’s content and intent, ChatGPT can provide personalized responses that address users’ needs and concerns.
- Knowledge Management: Manages a knowledge base within Salesforce. By analyzing customer inquiries and feedback, ChatGPT can identify common questions and issues, and generate relevant articles and resources to help customers find solutions to their problems.
- Sales Intelligence: Gathers insights and provides predictive analytics to help sales teams close more deals. By analyzing customer data and sales history, ChatGPT can provide insights into which customers are most likely to buy, which products are most popular, and which deals are most likely to close.
- EinsteinGPT: While not directly integrated with ChatGPT, this Salesforce offering intelligently digests and combines your company data with real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud. EinsteinGPT can perform tasks like creating a personalized email to a customer or gathering insights related to records in Salesforce, reducing the time spent manually performing these tasks.
By integrating ChatGPT with Salesforce, organizations can leverage its natural language-processing capabilities to improve customer engagement, increase sales, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Why all the hype?
ChatGPT possesses several unique features that distinguish it from other AI systems. Its advanced language abilities can understand and generate natural language with a high degree of accuracy and fluency. Unlike many other AI models designed for specific domains or tasks, ChatGPT is an open-domain AI that can handle a wide range of topics and domains. This flexibility makes it well suited for applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and customer service. By integrating these systems, businesses can provide faster and more efficient service to their customers, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
One of the platform’s most notable features is its ability to generate natural and easy-to-understand responses. This is achieved through machine-learning algorithms, which enable it to analyze patterns in the input text and generate output similar in style and tone. ChatGPT’s developers prioritized unbiased and impartial responses by training the system to eliminate any potential biases from the data. Upon completion of training, ChatGPT can provide reliable and accurate information to all users on the platform.
Another vital aspect of ChatGPT’s design is its ability to learn and improve over time. As users interact with the system and ask it questions, it continuously analyzes their input and adjusts its responses to better meet the users’ needs. This means that the more ChatGPT interacts with people, the more its responses will improve and become more accurate. Plus, a significant advantage of using an AI language model like this is that it can respond to users at any time of the day or night; it doesn’t need to take breaks or sleep, enabling it to provide users with instant responses whenever they need help.
Of course, there are some limitations to ChatGPT’s abilities. While it can provide information and answers to many questions, there may be some queries it cannot answer. Why? While the model used to train the AI covered a wealth of topics, it didn’t cover all of them — so ChatGPT simply may not have the answer. Another possibility is that the questions asked could be too complex or ambiguous for it to understand. Although, in our experience, we have to say that when using ChatGPT for actual communication-related tasks or research, we did not feel it had any pronounced limitations. As an AI language model, ChatGPT has proven itself to be a powerful tool for anyone seeking information or assistance in a wide range of fields.
Developer and coding skills
Many people are wondering how ChatGPT will affect development and code writing. Although ChatGPT needs a physical person to ask the right questions, it can generate code in a variety of programming languages with a decent level of accuracy… But how does that compare to an experienced developer?
Spinnaker put ChatGPT’s coding skills to the test by asking for snippets of popular programming languages, like Apex and JavaScript — and, in response, we received accurate code that fulfilled the requested tasks. That said, ChatGPT does not tend to take the most efficient approach, often choosing the most basic or raw implementation and not allowing for additional context or complexity that may exist in your Salesforce instance. In addition, when presented with specific requirements or requests that are lengthy and have a certain level of complexity, we noticed the most apparent AI limitations: lack of comprehension of the user’s statement, a mix of blocks of code that solve unrelated problems, and inefficient solutions.
Our perspective is that Artificial Intelligence still has a long way to go before it can replace software engineers. For now, AI remains a powerful tool with ever-increasing capabilities to boost productivity and cut hours of work, saving money for customers as it speeds up development. As time goes on, ChatGPT is expected to provide even more functionality, as a result of continuing to ingest information and evolve. But it’s a mystery as to when it’ll reach the point where it can fully develop an implementation of complex logic in an unsupervised and robust manner.
Leveraging the power of ChatGPT
At Spinnaker Support, we leverage ChatGPT in diverse ways to improve our productivity and reduce costs for our customers. For example, we actively use ChatGPT, among other AI tools, to boost developer productivity. This tool helps us write code, unit tests, and project documentation. ChatGPT also enables us to automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry, report generation, and scheduling. By leveraging ChatGPT’s natural language-processing capabilities, Spinnaker Support can create custom workflows that automate these tasks and free up our professionals’ time to focus on more complex and strategic work.
If you want to learn more about how Salesforce and ChatGPT can work together, please contact us to schedule some time!