Why is ChatGPT so widely popular? How does the debut of this new technology reveal the development and popular application of AI?
It is market consensus that ChatGPT will unleash a fresh wave of business opportunities. Quoting research data, Cally Chan, General Manager of Microsoft Hong Kong and Macau, pointed out that, just like Hong Kong, there is robust demand for AI services in Asia Pacific and China. Microsoft expects demand from business clients for AI services will continue to grow. In particular, corporate spending on AI systems in Asia Pacific will increase to USD46.6 billion by 2026 (up 126% on 2022) and the biggest share belongs to China where AI spending is estimated to come close to USD26.6 billion by 2026.
Well-suited to all industries for a wide range of applications
“We have seen an overwhelming response from local businesses to Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service*, especially GPT and ChatGPT. These services were quickly adopted in only a month after their launch.” Chan explained that more than 80% of Microsoft's Hong Kong corporate clients are seriously looking into using AI-based solutions to boost business value. Moreover, about 60% of cloud service enquiries from SMEs are related to AI. Apparently, companies of all sectors and sizes have considerable demand for AI.
Chan believes ChatGPT can understand contexts and generate meaningful replies by learning large amounts of natural language texts. It can also be trained to give personalized responses. “Its wide scope of application covers dialogue systems, natural language processing and machine translation, to name but a few.”
Simplifying business processes to reduce cost
“In fact, AI application has changed people's work and life style. For many companies, it is now an indispensable work assistant that can improve the operation efficiency of their workforce.” Chan took KBQuest, a partner of Microsoft, as an example. The company has found that, while it took nearly two weeks to handle a complaint in the past, their new generative AI complaint management solution can summarize key points of a complaint in 10 seconds. The system then classifies the case and forwards it to the relevant department according to seriousness. A reply to the complainant and internal reference data are automatically generated.
Chan indicated it is encouraging that many SMEs launched digital transformation successfully during the pandemic, empowering themselves to gain “first-mover advantage” in the post-COVID economic recovery era. These companies are poised to capture multiple business opportunities.
Protecting sensitive information and accelerating digital transformation
As for risk prevention, Chan admitted companies will unavoidably process sensitive information of various natures. This poses risks of fraud, identity theft, extortion and other illegal activities. Such data must be well protected. “When using ChatGPT, businesses must take adequate precautions to minimize risks. These include preparing a cybersecurity handbook, enhancing processing procedures for sensitive information, providing training to raise cybersecurity awareness and ensuring that employees know how to protect sensitive corporate information.”
In this modern AI age, artificial intelligence is everywhere. Chan feels that all businesses, industries and even individuals must make prompt and necessary deployments to make the best use of these new technologies. “As the digital transformation trend advances, we have been seeing an increasing number of enterprises using cloud service. Now that AI is here, businesses should quicken their pace to join the cloud community to get a head start.”
*Note: Azure OpenAI service aims to provide companies and developers with AI models, including GPT, ChatGPT, Codex, DALL‧E 2, other large-scale language models and the AI framework of Microsoft Azure, so they can develop their bespoke solutions.
