According to the Salesforce State of IT report, AI adoption among customer service professionals has risen by 88% between 2020 and 2022, with 50% of organizations using AI in 2022. However, 64% of IT leaders are concerned about the ethics of generative AI, and 62% are concerned about its impacts on their careers. IT leaders expect more investment in automation, with 87% expecting it to increase over the next year and a half. Security remains a top priority, with 89% of IT leaders citing it, and data encryption is the most-adopted enterprise security tactic.
Seven major tech companies, including Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft, have signed voluntary commitments focused on AI safety, cybersecurity, and public trust. The commitments include pre-release security testing for AI models, insider threat safeguards, cybersecurity investments, research into bias and privacy risks, and a watermarking system to inform users when content is AI-generated. The companies have entered into these agreements voluntarily. While there are currently no consequences if they fail to live up to their promises, they are expected to work on implementing them immediately. The move reflects the Biden administration’s growing focus on AI and comes ahead of an upcoming executive order and bipartisan legislation focused on AI.
Dave Willner, OpenAI’s head of trust and safety, is stepping down from the company amid increased scrutiny around privacy and security in the AI industry. OpenAI says it will search for a new trust lead, and CEO Sam Altman has called for AI regulations and backed an initiative to require licenses to develop powerful AI models.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has introduced “custom instructions” that allow users to set preferences to tailor how ChatGPT generates its responses. The instructions will be kept in consideration by ChatGPT when producing responses for every conversation, eliminating some of the challenges of prompt writing and making it easier to get intended results faster, increasing chatbot assistance. The feature is still in beta and only available for ChatGPT Plus users, but OpenAI says it will expand to all users in the upcoming weeks.
And a bit more on that Apple chatbot — it’s being used as an internal chatbot to prototype future features, summarize text, and answer questions based on data it has been trained with. One possibility for the tool is to be used by AppleCare support staff to help customers with issues better.
A recent report by Pure Storage found that 90% of IT buyers feel pressure to purchase technology their organizations don’t have the technical resources to support. In comparison, 62% feel pressure on their decisions “all the time or often.” The survey also revealed that 80% of IT buyers plan to invest in emerging technologies due to the current economic environment, with around one-third anticipating larger spending. The top areas of infrastructure that respondents said need to be updated are network and security, data management/storage, and data center facilities.
Leaders are generally concerned about the proper use of this technology. So far, the US government appears intent on not making the mistakes of the past of ignoring social media. I’m particularly interested in efforts to watermark AI-generated content, which could be a handy component in ensuring more responsible use of the technology.
I added that data about buyers’ pressure as a highlight to your customer approach. Don’t sleep on the value of slowing down to justify purchases. Even Apple doesn’t have this figured out.