Even if you haven’t tried artificial intelligence tools that can write essays and poems or conjure new images on command, chances are the companies that make or sell your household products are already starting to do so.
Mattel Inc. has put the AI image generator DALL-E to work by having it come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars.
Ocean State Job Lot Inc., the North Kingstown-based retailer, has deployed it for data analytics and is looking at bringing on IronClad, a state-of-the-art AI contract management tool.
Used-vehicle seller CarMax is summarizing thousands of customer reviews with the same “generative” AI technology that powers the popular chatbot ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, Snapchat is bringing a chatbot to its messaging service. And the grocery delivery company Instacart is integrating ChatGPT to answer customers’ food questions.
The Coca-Cola Co. plans to use generative AI to help create new marketing content. And while the company hasn’t detailed exactly how it plans to deploy the technology, the move reflects the growing pressure on businesses to harness tools that many of their employees and consumers are already trying on their own.
“We need to embrace those risks intelligently, experiment, build on those experiments, drive scale,” said Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey in a recent video announcing a partnership with startup OpenAI – maker of both DALL-E and ChatGPT – through an alliance led by the consulting firm Bain. “But not taking those risks is a hopeless point of view to start from.”
AI experts warn that businesses should carefully consider potential harms to customers, society and their own reputations before rushing to embrace ChatGPT and similar products in the workplace.
“I want people to think deeply before deploying this technology,” said Claire Leibowicz of The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit group founded and sponsored by the major tech providers that recently released a set of recommendations for companies producing AI-generated synthetic imagery, audio and other media. “They should play around and tinker, but we should also think, what purpose are these tools serving in the first place?”
Some companies have been experimenting with AI for a while. Mattel revealed its use of OpenAI’s image generator in October as a client of Microsoft Corp., which has a partnership with OpenAI that enables it to integrate its technology into Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
At Pawtucket-based Hasbro Inc., “we are exploring AI and all the opportunities it represents,” said Brian Chapman, president of design and development.
It wasn’t until the Nov. 30 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a free public tool, that widespread interest in generative AI tools began seeping into workplaces and executive suites.
John Conforti, chief financial officer at Ocean State Job Lot, says his company has fully embraced AI.
“Whether you’re in retail, business, government, or education, if you don’t start using AI, you’re going to lose your competitive edge,” Conforti said. “It’s a learning journey for everyone and we’re trying to pick up the best tools available.”
Ocean State Job Lot, he says, does not have a formal AI strategy. But Ironclad, the AI contract management tool, makes a lot of sense for the company, he says.
“We do a lot of negotiations for store locations, and we own a lot of property, so we have many tenant leases,” Conforti said. “We’re not looking to replace our legal team, but Ironclad could augment the team’s skills and make it more efficient.”
Ocean State also uses AI to analyze consumer data and is in the process of implementing a next-generation business intelligence tool called Domo.
“Domo will extract data for questions and answers,” said the company’s chief information officer, Hisham Aharon. “We can embed it into our analytics.”
There is reason for caution, however. While text generators can make the process of writing emails, presentations and marketing pitches faster and easier, they also have a tendency to confidently present misinformation as fact. Image generators trained on a huge trove of digital art and photography have raised copyright concerns from the original creators of those works.
Forrester analyst Rowan Curran says the tools should speed up some office tasks – much like previous innovations such as word processors and spell checkers – rather than putting people out of work, as some fear.
“Ultimately it’s part of the workflow,” Curran said. “It’s not like we’re talking about having a large language model just generate an entire marketing campaign and have that launch without expert senior marketers and all kinds of other controls.”
Public awareness fueled growing competition between cloud computing providers Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC, which sell their services to big organizations and have the massive computing power needed to train and operate AI models.
Amazon has taken a more muted tone, but makes its ambitions clear through its partnerships – most recently an expanded collaboration between its cloud computing division AWS and the startup Hugging Face, maker of a ChatGPT rival called Bloom.
Hugging Face decided to double down on its Amazon partnership after seeing the explosion of demand for generative AI products, says Clement Delangue, the startup’s co-founder and CEO. But Delangue contrasts his approach with competitors such as OpenAI, which doesn’t disclose its code and datasets.
Hugging Face hosts a platform that allows developers to share open-source AI models. That transparency is “really important because that’s the way for regulators, for example, to understand these models and be able to regulate,” he said.
It is also a way for “underrepresented people to understand where the biases can be [and] how the models have been trained,” so that the bias can be mitigated, Delangue said.
(Matt O'Brien and Haleluya Hadero are staff writers for The Associated Press. PBN Staff Writer Sam Wood contributed to this report.)
