Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney are sparking a veritable digital revolution, and major brands are sprinting to catch up. The mission? Weaving AI into their offerings to keep their services fresh in this bold, AI-fueled era. Companies are harnessing AI power to jazz up their software, shaping user experiences that are not just efficient and intuitive — but personalized too.

Allow me, Namecheap’s Undercover Geek, to take you on a journey through the AI-infused landscape of software products, exploring today’s trends and peering into the promising vistas of the future.

AI isn’t exactly new

From the way the news makes it sound, AI has just launched into our lives and will change the way we do everything. But in reality, AI has been around for a while, helping us in all kinds of ways, without us thinking much about it. For example, all of these services have relied on AI for years:

• Voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant
• Content moderation on social media
• Spelling and grammar checkers
• Warning systems in cars
• Facial recognition and predictive text on smartphones
• Applicant tracking systems (ATS) that review resumes and job applications
• Chatbots on e-commerce websites

In 2023, however, these methods of employing AI just aren’t enough for tech companies wanting to stand out and look toward the future.

How major brands are incorporating generative AI

There are so many companies bringing AI into their products that it would be a mammoth task to try to include all of them. These are some of the developments we think are most intriguing,

• Adobe’s Firefly AI – Generative Fill, a feature powered by Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI technology, enables users to make significant changes to images using text commands. Users can manipulate image content, including moving items to AI-generated environments such as alleys or under the Northern Lights, with the tool ensuring matching perspective, lighting, and style. This feature, which alters images non-destructively in seconds, is part of Adobe’s broader integration of AI into its Creative Cloud applications. The beta release of Photoshop is the first application to integrate Firefly, with Generative Fill also available for web testing via the Firefly beta.

• wordpress – Although AI isn’t built directly into WordPress core (yet!), there are plenty of themes and plugins, as well as other tools, that work well with WordPress. You can use an AI-powered website builder, use plugins that utilize AI to help with SEO and content marketing, and so much more. This is such a hot area for developers, and we expect that over the next few months there will be a lot more WordPress AI tools. For now, head over to the EasyWP blog to learn more about AI for WordPress.

• Grammarly – Grammarly, a tool that corrects writing errors and suggests better wording, has introduced its own generative AI tool called Grammarly Go. The tool, in its beta version, crafts messages across various platforms like email and social media. It can write bits of text or assist with refining your own writing. As CNET reports, GrammarlyGo offers basic contextual understanding and can adjust for formality and tone.

• Microsoft – Like Google, Microsoft has a whole slate of AI-enhanced products now. The company has incorporated Open AI’s GPT-4 into its Bing search engine, available to those using the Edge browser. The Bing chatbot is also available on Skype. But that’s not all. Edge also includes the tech behind the DALL-E image generator, so you can create images on the fly. Beyond browsers, Microsoft has also rolled out Copilot, which brings the chatbot into business IT environments within Microsoft Teams. Imagine ChatGPT interacting with your communication and documents, making it easier to get started on projects or summarize materials in a flash. (You might also like our recent article, Is Bing booming in the era of AI?)

• Slack – Like other products in this list, Slack brings large language models, including both Anthropic’s Claude and Open AI’s GPT to supercharge its own chatbots, allowing the bots to better perform tasks such as answering questions. Slack’s Workflow Builder brings automation to the platform, allowing users to set alerts or perform other tasks.

• Salesforce/Tableau – Salesforce has announced the launch of two new AI-enhanced data analytics tools. Tableau GPT provides streamlined access to AI-powered analytics, helping users make swift, informed decisions. Tableau Pulse offers a personalized analytics experience to business users, using insights generated by Tableau GPT. The new tools leverage generative AI to create visualizations, suggest new charts and questions, and surface new insights.

• LinkedIn – Under Microsoft’s ownership, it’s not surprising that LinkedIn is leaning into the use of AI, particularly OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 models, for various aspects of its platform. It has introduced AI-powered writing suggestions to enhance LinkedIn profiles and assist recruiters in creating job descriptions. Aimed at Premium users initially, this tool is designed to turn basic information into a more engaging narrative. Moreover, the company is emphasizing AI in its LinkedIn Learning platform, curating 100 courses focused on the subject and adding 20 more dedicated solely to generative AI. The lack of transparency about the involvement of AI in generating content also poses issues, especially in recruitment scenarios. Despite these concerns, LinkedIn is committed to leveraging generative AI in ways that could benefit its members and customers.

• Atlassian – The company known for its collaboration tools has integrated AI into its Cloud products. Atlassian Intelligence uses machine learning and large language models, in collaboration with OpenAI, to personalize product experiences. This AI assistant can generate, summarize, and extract information from content, assist in defining test plans, provide instant help, and accelerate service management. The platform also features a virtual agent in Jira Service Management that can resolve help requests instantly and summarize activity on requests. It also offers an on-demand company-specific dictionary and can answer natural language questions related to institutional knowledge, policies, or other complex queries.

Most of the current implementation of AI into online platforms and software is aimed directly at workplace productivity. These tools aim to make it easier to craft documents, create illustrations, collaborate on products, and communicate with team members. A few, including Atlassian, offer tools that could also benefit human resources and customer support.

It’s also interesting — though not surprising — that most of these platforms use Open AI’s GPT models, DALL-E’s image generation (or similar models), under the hood. While the AI ​​tools themselves are innovative, the way these companies implement them is less so. In what appears to be a new space race, all of these companies are essentially investing heavily in the same kind of technology, hoping that their implementation, user interface, and use cases are what catch on with the general public or in their niche.

The need for AI transparency

When companies employ AI tools to generate text or images, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. But users and customers may not always recognize that an AI is behind the scenes, especially when communicating with customer support or submitting materials for review. As noted above, it’s also helpful to know if the information a platform provides, such as job applicant profiles or workplace projects, was created by an individual or if it was generated by AI.

This is why companies should be transparent about their use of AI and how they use and store any data submitted by their users, lest that information gets slurped up into the next large language model or image generation database. For more information about brand transparency and AI, check out our recent article.

I think we’ve all realized by now that the explosion of artificial intelligence this year is really going to make some major changes to the world. Every one of us will have heard of AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and DALL-E, which can create all types of content in a matter of seconds. And every day, there’s a new story about the different fields and industries adopting these tools, along with the weird and wonderful ways they can be used.

So it seems that generative AI is here to stay. But exactly how we respond to it and the way we build our new AI-enabled future is where we need to look next.

What do people think of generative AI?

The introduction of AI tools this year has certainly been sudden. While we are more accustomed to graduate technological adoption, AI in 2023 has been quite a shock to the system.

The response has been mixed, with some welcoming the great promises of the new AI capabilities, while others warn of various potential dangers.

In March, an open letter signed by a list of big names in tech called for a 6-month pause on AI development while the world catches up. Even the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said that he agreed with parts of the letter.

More recently, Altman joined the warnings issued by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a not-for-profit organization. Hundreds of other industry employees have also put their names to the statement, along with celebrities that include musician Grimes and podcaster Sam Harris.

When a recent UK-based YouGov poll asked Americans about the impact of AI tools on society, 19% see the technology as a good thing for society, and 34% see it as a bad thing, with 24% neutral and 23% undecided. However, a closer look at the different age groups shows that younger people have a more positive attitude towards AI.

The Pew Research Center found that among Americans who know a little about AI tools, only 16% thought that it represents a major advance in writing news articles, compared to those who saw it as a minor advance (28%), not any advance at all (45%).

But the same group saw the advantages of AI in more specific areas, with as many as 59% seeing the application of AI as a major advance in predicting protein structures in cells, compared to the minority seeing it as a minor advance (27%) . Other fields for which a greater proportion saw AI as a major advance were producing drought and heat-resistant crops, and predicting extreme weather.

In a recent Namecheap survey on generative AI, respondents revealed that they were most excited about generative AI for the purposes of content creation and marketing. The biggest concerns involved false information shared as fact and misuse of intellectual property.

AI regulation

The YouGov poll found that most Americans — on both sides of the political divide — support government regulation of artificial intelligence. And when Altman testified before Congress last month, he also recommended that senators introduce new AI regulations.

Europe is stricter on tech regulation, and AI is no exception. ChatGPT was banned in Italy for 20 days over privacy concerns, and in May, the European Parliament introduced the AI ​​Act to govern the way the technology is used.

How are people using generative AI?

It hasn’t been widely available for a long time, but it already seems that generative AI tools are being taken up by people working in different fields.

The Namecheap survey found that 40% of respondents use generative AI tools daily, and 10% use them on a monthly basis. The vast majority (70%) use ChatGPT, with around 30% using DALL-E or Midjourney. Most people are using these tools for work purposes.

Another poll found that 80% of Nature readers have already used AI tools, and 43% use them for writing code, assistance in writing manuscripts, creating presentations, literature research, and research.

So what can these AI tools actually do for us? Many people have wholeheartedly embraced the new technology and here are some of the ways they have been increasing efficiency and productivity in their daily work:

• Bringing improvements to customer service by summarizing past conversations and chats when referring to previous interactions with customers.
• Using ChatGPT to create an online business on a budget of $100.
• Writers are using ChatGPT to assist with writing tasks like brainstorming article titles, writing press releases, creating call-to-action terms, and creating article summaries.
• Celebrated musicians using AI tools for such things as producing voice samples, after months of neural network training.
• Respondents to the Namecheap survey said they use AI tools for ideation, data analysis, summary writing, creating illustrations, and writing code.

It would be great if AI could help us get through our daily work more easily. But some people have gone beyond that, experimenting and pushing the tech to see just how far it can go.

Here are some of the amazing things people have been using AI tools for:

• Creating a ChatGPT plugin that can be used to come up with a list of domain name ideas, which then checks if they are available — all within the ChatGPT software.
• Creating a Twitter clone in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can be used for various purposes on social media. And then getting the tool to program and automate certain interactions on the platform.
• In the field of blockchain, ChatGPT has been used to check for security issues with a new Ethereum contract.
• Making a game of Pong in less than 60 seconds. Well, it may not be too impressive considering where we are in technological advancements, but the speed is incredible!

These are just some of the jobs that people have found for AI tools, but the list is growing by the day. Right now, everyone is eager to hear about the creative new ways generative AI is being applied.

What’s next for generative AI?

As we’ve seen, AI tools are already helping people working in different fields. They have been particularly useful for people working in marketing and related fields. But in the future, we are likely to see these capabilities taken to a whole new level.

Gartner predicts that generative AI will find a place in five new areas: drug design, material science, chip design, synthetic data, and part design. This means AI tools will take on the roles of scientists and engineers, bringing much more efficiency to disparate industries.

Does this mean that technology will advance faster and we will see some amazing breakthroughs, curing diseases and improving climatic conditions? When I asked ChatGPT, the answer I received was affirmative and optimistic. The concluding sentence of the paragraph read: The possibilities are truly endless!

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