ChatGPT is being used to automatically write emails: Microsoft, Salesforce, and TikTok creators are hopping on the trend
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
AI chatbots are already being used to send custom email pitches. It shows how AI like ChatGPT may soon play a significant role in business, with companies like Salesforce and Microsoft beginning to offer tighter integration between the chatbot and their software.
A recent viral Tiktok showed how it’s possible to use ChatGPT integrated with Google Sheets to write ten custom LinkedIn messages to executives asking for a meeting. It identified different potential companies in an industry and their CEOs, and generated different outreach notes for each one, including a unique question to ask.
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“I think we’re at a very interesting inflection point of how we’ll begin to use AI in the future in our day-to-day lives that wasn’t as easily accessible even six months ago, before ChatGPT was more readily available to the public,” said Alex Klufas, a creator who makes videos focused on working in the tech industry.
The video — and previous viral posts displaying similar techniques — clearly struck a nerve, with 2.5 million views, and scores of comments asking how it worked.
Generative AI and tools using large language model (LLM) techniques like ChatGPT have led to a boom as big tech companies and startups alike race to integrate software capable of producing content that resembles something a human would write.
Few LLM-based products are actually making money. Microsoft and Google are working to integrate next-level chatbots into search engines. Companies are working on using these bots to write marketing copy or computer code.
There’s one particularly promising application that could be commercialized in the near future: Using the power of a chatbot to quickly write and automate emails with a little bit of personalization, perhaps for sales, marketing, or personal networking. Microsoft and Salesforce announced new products this week with that exact feature.
Financial analysts at Credit Suisse pointed to email generation several times in a note earlier this month as a concrete and near-term use for the technology. The analysts estimated Microsoft’s recently announced generated AI sales features could help it take market share and potentially add over $768 million in annual revenue.
Products coming to market
On Tuesday, Salesforce announced its LLM product called EinsteinGPT, which uses an OpenAI ChatGPT model. It can automatically write marketing emails — a logical integration because Salesforce’s main product is a web app that keeps track of how often salespeople contact leads.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff demoed the software, using it to identify two contacts at a company, then automatically generating a one-sentence email trying to arrange a meeting. In the demo, EinsteinGPT softened the cold outreach email after the user told the software to be less formal.
Salesforce hasn’t set a price for the tools yet but said it’s in testing now with pilot customers.
Microsoft announced on Monday that it would integrate generative AI based on ChatGPT into a set of tools for business called CoPilot. One of its primary features is using AI to generate emails.
In a demo video, Microsoft showed the feature integrated into an Outlook mailbox and provided examples of using it to reply to a request for proposal, or to suggest a meeting time with a customer.
In the example, an inbound email wanted to follow up on a potential sales deal, and Microsoft’s feature offered four different draft replies, including one that offered a discount and another that addressed a concern.
Microsoft says that its AI email writer can take important context from the email thread, like the price that was previously discussed, and stick it in the response drafted by AI. In the example provided by Microsoft, the user takes the AI draft and edits it before sending it.
Microsoft’s feature is currently in beta testing, but will be released to customers of Microsoft’s Viva Sales feature on March 15, the company said on Monday.
Some startups have even trained their sights on developing customized AIs that can respond to messages the same way that their owner would, by analyzing a user’s previous email and text interactions and integrating it into a personalized AI model.
“The benefit is people who would want to communicate with you where you don’t have time to get back to them, where you don’t have time to offer your mind,” said Suman Kanuganti, founder of personal.ai, a chatbot currently in beta mode. “In those scenarios, you can choose to either have your AI help you in co-pilot mode or offer [automatic] responses to them in autopilot mode.”
Shortcomings
Some worry that the ability to generate email text could be abused to spam people and that chatbots could be used to phish for people’s private passwords.
“We could see mass targeted messages and spam indistinguishable from dedicated email,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note this month that examined the AI industry.
ChatGPT is also prone to “hallucinating,” or making stuff up. It merely predicts what the next word or part of a phrase should be based on statistics, and doesn’t know whether it’s correct or not.
Microsoft said in its announcement that it would use data from its software to ground the replies in facts, and has a thumbs-down button so users can tell the bot that a response was unhelpful. That helps train the model to avoid the same mistake in the future. A Salesforce executive previously told CNBC that it was moving as quickly as it could without compromising a responsible, ethical approach.
But the limits of ChatGPT were clearly visible in the viral TikTok video. While some recommendations were correct, several of the CEOs ChatGPT recommended for outreach were either former CEOs or are not currently an executive at the company. While the text for the cold outreach looked appropriate, it would still likely require a human to make sure everything was actually right.
“I think anyone using this technology, as nascent as it is, has to do that due diligence,” Kluflas said. She didn’t end up sending the notes generated by ChatGPT because she’s not currently looking for a job.
But she’s still excited about using ChatGPT to help her make TikToks and other content for social media. Her latest application is to use ChatGPT to produce TikTok captions packed with the keywords that make her videos easier to find online.
Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
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