The use of ChatGPT and other conversational AI by a consultant

ChatGPT, Bard, and others to come.

You may have heard or seen these names somewhere, in a scientific journal, on LinkedIn, or maybe your father mentioned them during a family dinner.

Conversational AIs are making a spectacular entrance into our lives, ever since ChatGPT appeared at the end of 2022. So spectacular that OpenAI's service became the platform to reach one million users the fastest, in just five days. While it took Instagram 2.5 months, Spotify 5 months, and Netflix nearly 2.5 years to reach this audience. A success that ChatGPT certainly did not expect. So spectacular that Microsoft announced it wants to inject an additional $10 billion into the company to develop its business and use this service on its search engine: Bing.

All this excitement surrounding conversational AIs is understandable; if you've never tried ChatGPT, imagine talking to a robot that has read and recorded all encyclopedias in the world. That's ChatGPT. And even then, we're talking about a conversational AI that doesn't have real-time access to the internet and has been trained with "only" 175 billion data points (soon to be 10,000 billion for the GPT-4 version).

Now that you know a little more, it's essential to understand that ChatGPT can also help you with your daily questions. For example, it can present you with a workout program to get back into shape, give you a recipe for making pancakes, or provide a piece of code to help you create your website.

Some people quickly understood the impact that ChatGPT could have on their personal lives as well as their work. Maybe a bit too much impact. To the extent that Amazon asked its employees not to feed ChatGPT with internal company data, afraid that it might become public.

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Now that you have a brief picture of ChatGPT, what about its use at Fusion Partners? Do we use it? For what? For what purpose?

Yes, some employees have been using ChatGPT since the beginning of 2023, all with the aim of improving their productivity and creativity.

Research

At Fusion Partners, we work on a wide range of topics (from finance to real estate, insurance, and entertainment), which is why it is important for us to have a quick overview of a subject.

That's why we use ChatGPT. We ask it questions to get the big picture of a topic. It is an incredible time-saver that allows teams to quickly get up to speed.

Subsequently, team members know which direction to look to deepen the subject with additional research.

Ideas generation

As consultants and venture builders, we build startups for ourselves and for our clients, such as WeBuild. To do this, we need to find innovative and feasible business models for the Swiss market.

Some of our colleagues use conversational AI to generate lists of potential business model ideas. Once these lists are generated, the work of the venture builder takes over to confirm which ideas are viable on the market.

Content Synthesis

Our venture builders spend a lot of time reading and researching to understand their subjects. ChatGPT can summarize the main points of a text to highlight the major ideas. Furthermore, it is possible to request additional information on certain points. The conversational AI will then provide a detailed response with information present in the text.

Today, some applications use this functionality. For instance, ReaderGPT is a Google Chrome extension that can synthesize a text on a web page using your OpenAI account.

Idea structuring

Open AI's conversational AI is also very powerful when it comes to structuring a problem. Once the topic is well understood by our collaborators, it is possible to obtain outline plans, while logically organizing the ideas that have been brought to it.

It is still difficult for ChatGPT to truly understand the deep meaning of a problem and to draw a complex and complete plan from it. But having an outline allows us to start from a base and improve it in order to tell the best possible story.

Writing

On this point, ChatGPT is quite good and allows, just like idea structuring, to create text outlines. It allows you to write any type of text, whether it's articles, commercial proposals, headlines, explanatory paragraphs, and much more.

However, after 2 months of use, we are starting to see a pattern emerge in the writing of its texts. A structure, always the same, despite the different requests we can make of it.

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ChatGPT is a tool that greatly improves the productivity of Fusion Partners employees. However, it should not be believed that this tool does all the work for us. ChatGPT often lacks that little touch of intelligence in its responses, which makes a venture builder, a great venture builder.