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.
related investing news
“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.
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) passengers walk off a train at the Richmond station on March 15, 2023 in Richmond, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Commuters in and around San Francisco rode into work for free on Tuesday morning due to an outage in the Clipper card system, which is used to handle payments for train, bus and ferry rides.
“ATTENTION: The Clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators this morning,” the Bay Area Clipper account wrote in a post on X. “Please be prepared to pay your fare with another form of payment if required by your transit agency.”
Many buses were waving commuters on without asking for payment, and at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train stations, the faregates were open, allowing travelers to walk through for free.
Clipper is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages transportation for the nine-county Bay Area. The service is used by hundreds of thousands of tech workers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
The MTC website said there were 1.35 million unique Clipper cards — physical and digital — used in May, the highest monthly toll for the year and the most since December 2019, before the pandemic. A fact sheet from the MTC says Clipper is used by 800,000 transit riders a day across the region.
BART fare gates open on July 1, 2025, due to Clipper outage
Kif Leswing
BART, in particular, has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, most notably installing fare gates starting in late 2023, with full deployment expected to be completed by the end of this year.
In the first five months of the year, average BART station exits totaled between 170,000 and 182,000 a month, according to its website. Those numbers are way down from the pre-pandemic days of 2019, when averages were generally above 400,000 a month.
The MTC has plans to roll out an updated system called Clipper 2.0, which it says will be a “customer-focused, cost-effective fare collection system” with a “flexible platform for future fare structures.” Features include use across the various mobile operating systems, updated communication and “expanded retail, online and mobile sales.”
The update, however, has been routinely delayed, leading to tense confrontations at recent Clipper executive board meetings.
An image of a Quantix drone made by AeroVironment.
David Mcnew | Getty Images News | Getty Images
AeroVironment shares fell 7% Tuesday after the defense contractor said it plans to offer $750 million in common stock and $600 million in convertible senior notes due in 2030 to repay debt.
The drone maker said it would use leftover funding for general purposes such as boosting manufacturing capacity.
AeroVironment shares have soared 85% this year, ballooning its market value to about $13 billion.
Last week, shares of the Arlington, Virginia-based company rallied on strong fourth-quarter results, lifting higher as CNBC’s Jim Cramer called it the “next Palantir of hardware.”
Last month, the company also closed its $4.1 billion acquisition of space-related defense tech company Blue Halo.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to boost drone production in the U.S. and crack down on unauthorized uses.
The company also has a high short interest level, which may have contributed to some of the recent gains, creating a short squeeze. This phenomenon occurs when a stock price surges, forcing those shorting the stock to purchase shares to cover their positions and prevent losses.
Aerovironment 1 month stock chart
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike