How ChatGPT changed business in its first year

Good morning.

What a difference a year makes. At last year’s Brainstorm AI conference, ChatGPT had just been released, and the possibilities of using it in business were largely theoretical. This year, the conference is filled with executives from various industries who are using generative AI with stunning results. Judging from comments here, it is already transforming banking, investing, job search, drug development, retail, and more. It’s also providing new superpowers to scammers, raising gnarly questions around copyright and intellectual property, and suffering still from a disturbing tendency to “hallucinate.” It’s changing the world—but not always for the better.

Some excerpts:

“We’ve been developing and deploying AI applications for 10 years. But I think all of us, over the last 12 months, have seen a massive inflection point with the rise of generative AI capabilities.”

—Madhav Thattai, Chief Operating Officer, Salesforce AI

“We’ve dealt with powerful technologies, and the good and the ill ways that people have used them throughout the history of human beings. What is exceptionally different about this technology is its breadth.”

—Arati Prabhakar, Director of the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy

“Embracing AI as a company is critical. Everybody in this room, there is not a part of your business [that won’t be affected]. It is so pervasive. AI is going to be used for your product development. It’s going to write code, write the test parameters, test the code. It's going to be used in your operations to become more efficient. And it will be embedded in your products and services. If there isn’t a holistic adoption of AI throughout the organization, you’re really putting yourself at a disadvantage.”

—Jim Cathey, Chief Commercial Officer, Qualcomm

“Find your early wins and then let those early employees evangelize about how their time went faster when AI took away the toil work. We found it was 30% more free time for those IT specialists. They didn’t go away. We put them on more strategic work.”

—Kyle Daigle, Chief Operating Officer, Github

“It’s valuable for a teacher to do things like lesson planning, grading papers, reading progress reports. And the more we’ve worked on it, we realized it could do things that even transcend what a traditional tutor can do. We have simulations where you can talk to Eeyore the donkey or Jay Gatsby. Simulations where you can talk to Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson. We just launched last week an application where it won’t write your essay for you, but you can get feedback on your essays.”

—Sal Khan, founder, Khan Academy, speaking about the Khanmigo virtual tutor

“You can make it hallucinate less with hard work, fine tuning.” 

—Sissie Hsiao, Vice President and General Manager, Google Assistant and Bard

“Our big hope is we will be able to do for cancer what we did for COVID.”

—Lidia Fonseca, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Pfizer

More from the conference here. Separately, check out this year’s Fortune Impact 20 list, presented by TPG's The Rise Fund, which highlights 20 startups that have built their business models around world-changing work, using the profit motive to solve social and environmental problems.

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Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com