You’ve very likely already read much about ChatGPT and its future impact on various aspects of technology, content and digital experiences. And if you’ve tried it out for yourself, you may also have had your own thoughts on what looks to be a milestone in the history of AI that will be celebrated in years to come.
ChatGPT certainly feels like it will have an impact on the world of digital customer experience, not just in terms of content generation, but also across several other areas, too. From the implementation of chatbots to SEO, ChatGPT and related services could have an influence.
However, to a certain extent, the impact of ChatGPT is a catalyst for trends that were already in place. AI-powered services have steadily been improving in the background over a number of years, and the recent viral nature of ChatGPT means that more of us — and crucially senior management — are now more aware of how much AI has evolved and its relative potential.
Let’s look at six ways ChatGPT may influence and even change the digital customer experience space.
Chatbots and Conversational Interfaces
The use of chatbots and conversational interfaces as a customer experience channel has been around for a number of years now and is set to grow. Back in July, Gartner predicted that chatbots will become a “primary customer service channel” by 2027 for a quarter of all organizations. Meanwhile there are multiple predictions of the rapid growth of the chatbot software industry with some eyebrow-raising compound annual growth rate statistics.
However, ChatGPT3 feels like a significant leap in the quality and sophistication of conversational responses that a chatbot can deliver and could further accelerate the use of conversational interfaces within customer experience. It has the potential to open up greater awareness and acceptance of the use of chatbots for digital teams responsible for deployment, but also in terms of usage by customers. ChatGPT3 also raises expectations of what is possible, and it feels inevitable that it will prove to be a catalyst for more chatbots appearing on web and commerce sites.
Related Article: OpenAI’s New ChatGPT Might Be the First Good Chatbot
AI-Powered Content Generation
Much has been written about ChatGPT and its impact on content generation. Generative AI has become increasingly sophisticated with the creation of various startups and services built around writing content, but until now professional usage has not necessarily felt widespread. Clearly that is likely to change in the ChatGPT era with content generation likely to be increasingly partially or even fully automated — whether that is starting off an item that is then edited by a human being, or even fully generating and publishing copy as an end-to-end process. (That approach comes with its own set of challenges).
It will be fascinating to see where this ends up and what automation can bring. For brands there are questions to consider in how to use automation in content generation and maintain tone of voice, but services can undoubtedly be trained to produce content in a particular style.
There are also potential issues around authenticity, especially with content that has been attributed to an individual. Will customers learn to sniff out when a piece of writing has originated from ChatGPT or another automated service? And will there be an emphasis on completely human-produced content as a positive brand attribute? There are already services developed to indicate if a piece of writing originated from AI and whether it could negatively impact your SEO, for example, as well as apps specifically designed to detect material generated by ChatGPT.
Currently it seems like the best use of ChatGPT and AI-driven content generation is as a starting point to speed up and improve the human-driven writing process without sacrificing engagement through brand identity, authenticity and good writing. As ChatGPT works on version 4 and becomes more sophisticated, that may well change.
Marketing Automation and Hyperpersonalization
Marketing automation is an obvious area where ChatGPT’s content generation could prove to be particularly valuable with the ability to produce hyperpersonalized content on the fly based on individual customer journeys and interactions.
Personalized responses to individual interactions is usually too time-consuming for marketing teams, but ChatGPT services could potentially generate sophisticated responses at the individual level to deliver effective marketing automation at scale.
Related Article: ChatGPT Shares Its Thoughts on Enterprise VoC Programs
Low-Code/No-Code Solutions
ChatGPT and related services like GitHub’s Copilot (which is also powered by OpenAI) provide coding suggestions for both frontend and backend development, as well as the ability to check errors, clean up code and so forth. This has the potential to combine with low-code/no-code solutions to provide coding suggestions for non-IT professionals, probably more for simple stylistic changes and additions and templates, for example, a suggestion for a JSON snippet.
While automated code suggestions for non-IT professionals come with a swath of risks, these could potentially be limited within the structure of a product, or even bypass the need to expose the code to the person requesting it. For example, a marketer could describe what they were looking for stylistically, have code returned — and have this implemented within seconds on a page within their DXP or CMS solution.
Digital Experience Platforms
ChatGPT also may have an impact on digital experience platforms (DXPs), keen to integrate powerful generative AI services into the fabric of key features. AI is already encroaching on DXPs, but mainly around marketing automation and personalization to date. ChatGPT could add more AI around content generation, for example:
- Generating content that can be put straight into a particular layout template
- Making suggestions for improving content
- Marketing automated personalized responses.
Low-code and no-code platforms may also potentially generate code to support non-developers, while an added out-of-the-box chatbot may also be included as part of a DXP’s set of capabilities. Given DXPs are keen to offer additional SaaS services and capabilities as part of a composable architecture model, we can expect some acquisitions of niche AI providers in this area in the next year or two.
Search Engine Optimization
ChatGPT may not have a profound immediate effect on SEO in the same way that it will have on content generation, but it could have an impact on the medium in the long term. Certainly, it seems likely that content that can be detected as originating from ChatGPT. Other AI-driven services will be penalized in the same way some obviously-autogenerated content today can lower your rankings.
Today, however, SEO professionals are already using ChatGPT for their research, specifically suggesting keywords and even helping understand search intent. SEO services that are combined with a layer of ChatGPT intelligence could start to provide more automated services to improve content for SEO and open up optimization to non-SEO experts and beginners.
Conclusion: A Catalyst for AI Services
AI has already been influencing the digital customer experience space in various ways, but ChatGPT is likely to accelerate the take-up rate and interest in the use of AI and machine learning, particularly in content generation. We’re going to see its influence in everything from the evolution of DXPs to specialist solutions to how content is created and managed, and this could happen sooner than we think.
And by the way, in case you were wondering, ChatGPT didn’t write this article.
