AI. You might have heard of it.
The speed and extent to which artificial intelligence has taken hold of both the UCC space and the world at large has been incredible. Its potential is thrilling, fascinating, and terrifying in equal measure.
That isn't to say AI emerged from a vacuum — organisations like Qualcomm and DeepMind have been researching AI for over a decade, while UCC and CX businesses like Dialpad have been working on AI-powered solutions for years. But AI only became a fully mainstream idea (practically overnight) after OpenAI's ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022's epilogue and lit the spark for its explosion into public consciousness and the catalyst for the world's most prominent tech giants to accelerate their own AI projects.
But for most of this year, and for most managers and workers, AI tended to be thought about in abstract terms. It was a concept presented to most IT and technology admins and managers as something that would streamline workflows, boost productivity and, potentially, drive revenues while cutting costs.
OpenAI and Microsoft. Google and Anthropic. All these AI businesses put together compelling marketing pitches about how AI will revolutionise the business world and delivered some tantalising peaks into such a prospect with some major product launches. But for now, AI still remains something of an early draft of itself.
As 2023 becomes 2024, which promises to be where AI's impact becomes palatable, where do the biggest players stand?
The OpenAI Piece
OpenAI started it all with the launch of ChatGPT at the tail end of 2022, introducing the average person to what AI can be in its early form.
OpenAI has come under scrutiny, however. For all its wonderful capabilities, ChatGPT is still effectively a prototype of AI at large and includes just as many flaws as any other early version of any other product. An infallible encyclopaedia of knowledge and support it most certainly is not. It's been widely criticised for producing "hallucinations", answers to prompts that are either inaccurate, outdated or outright lies.
Complementing the controversy of the hallucinations has been the concern about data breaches when employees input sensitive business information into their prompts, as ChatGPT, in its basic form, inputs user prompts for training. These security risks facilitated OpenAI's decision to launch ChatGPT Enterprise in August — including enterprise-grade security and privacy, customisation options, and longer context windows for processing more extended inputs.
The launch of the faster, more advanced, subscription-based GPT-4 — whose knowledge base was up to date, rather than GPT-3.5's limitations to being able to answer queries based on knowledge from 2021 or earlier — saw OpenAI elevate ChatGPT to another level, while ChatGPT Enterprise (and its unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access) helped maintain its momentum over the course of 2023.
While November's saga, in which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired by its board before being reinstated four days later and all but one of the board resigning as a consequence, will have a long-term impact on OpenAI's upward trajectory remains up in the air.
As does its closer relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft had been OpenAI's largest investor before November's melodrama, having put forward roughly $13 billion into the company since 2019 and having integrated ChatGPT and other OpenAI LLMs across its suite of collaboration and communications products.
Microsoft had publicly supported Altman's return and even hired him for a few days before his return to OpenAI. Following the week of mayhem, Microsoft now has a nonvoting position on OpenAI's board, and Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has publicly spoken about monitoring OpenAI's governance.
Although, on paper, the closer dynamic between OpenAI and Microsoft that seems to have been fostered since last month should result in greater collaboration and innovation, it's also caught the attention of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is now probing the pair of businesses to see whether “recent developments” have seen the partnership expand into a “relevant merger situation”.
What About the Rest of Microsoft's AI Projects?
Of course, Microsoft has also been working on its own AI projects. The most significant, naturally, was Copilot — which you would probably have to have been living under a rock to have missed.
Copilot for Windows, its free, consumer-centric iteration, launched in September, while Copilot for 365, its enterprise-targeting sister, launched in November. The free generative AI productivity tool included the new Copilot user experience and Bing Chat, and if you're reading this article on the Edge browser, you can leverage it this moment by licking the Copilot icon in the top right corner of your screen.
What 365 Copilot offers beyond Microsoft Copilot is commercial data protection, guaranteed security, privacy and compliance, the AI-powered Microsoft 365 Chat, and integration across the Microsoft 365 Apps.
Microsoft released other AI products over the course of 2023, namely Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise, two generative AI tools similar to ChatGPT, albeit the latter sought to win over businesses concerned about data leaks by highlighting its emphasis on security and privacy. However, last month Microsoft announced that both Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise had been rebranded under the Copilot umbrella. Copilot had become not only Microsoft's flagship AI product but also its universal one.
Industry rumours suggest that uptake on Copilot for 365 hasn't been as fruitful as Microsoft hoped. Potential factors could be its restriction to a minimum of 500 seats for subscription, as well as the relatively steep asking price of $30 per user per month at a time when many businesses are cutting tech budgets, given global uncertainty. However, it's still early days, and Microsoft aims to lift the subscription seat minimum in 2024, which could boost its sales significantly.
