ChatGPT’s potential to revolutionise retail and education

We interact with chatbots all the time — they’ve become commonplace. If you buy data using Absa’s ChatBanking on WhatsApp or Facebook, that’s a chatbot. Secured an e-boarding pass for your FlySafair flight? Another bot. Or used Ask Discovery to get your latest tax certificate? Your query was answered by a machine.

So what makes ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence (AI), important in the evolution of this technology?

ChatGPT stands out with its easy user interface and impressive model. With over 170-billion parameters, it can simultaneously process vast information and its behaviour can mimic human quirks.

Reactions to ChatGPT have been mixed, with concerns about its unpredictability and the need for regulation. However, it could revolutionise human interaction, learning and navigation.

We are seeing its potential to transform how we interact with brands, shop and make decisions. This has huge implications for the retail industry.

Retail marketers beware

While you won’t find a chat robot running around your local store any time soon, the tool is likely to hold value in e-commerce and, for consumers, as an online buying tool that they can use to compare products across brands. This will necessitate up-to-date and accurate information for retailers and brands, which ChatGPT can use to guide consumers. 

The ability to compare products and prices is the first effect we can expect to see in the retail space. The second is hyper-personalisation. This is not new when brands like Nutella and Coca-Cola offer personalised labels or cans bearing your name.

However, AI can give marketers the personal insights and real-time data they need to create advertisements or product specials targeting consumers and their needs. The potential this opens for marketers is staggering.

We can also expect to see AI output influencing how brands engage with customers more personally and interactively. This could take the form of getting instant answers online or as a support and customer service mechanism, which answers questions and provides instant feedback. Amazon and Shopify are already moving into this space. 

Two crucial aspects to consider involve the possible shift from stores as sales channels to showrooms and what this means for jobs and the physical buying experience. Then there is the issue of brand positioning and differentiation in a crowded retail space.

Companies guard this information gathered in these areas jealously, but trade secrets would become veritable open-books to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This could be construed as a threat to retailers, though I would argue that the bigger threat will emerge when large numbers of people blindly trust the output from LLMs — even if the technology gets it wrong occasionally.

If you thought fake news was a problem, wait until the technology moves from the AI that powers self-driving cars and morphs into general intelligence, which can do anything a person can — including influence human perceptions.

Education is not immune

My Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs) colleague, Roze Phillips, spoke during the 11th Academy of Science of SA (ASSAf) Presidential Roundtable Discussion in February, which explored the implications of ChatGPT on higher education. 

Phillips shared the position Gibs has adopted in the face of contentious debate among global academics. The likes of Prof Ethan Mollick from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School are using the tool and now require students to use it to develop what he calls an “emerging skill”.

Conversely, several schools and universities across the globe have responded by banning ChatGPT, citing issues around misinformation and potential plagiarism.

Urging delegates to “calm your inner Luddite”, Phillips reinforced that the role of education is to learn, not to pass tests or police plagiarism. “I’m worried we are losing our eye off the student — which we should never do. Is our education about being as efficient as we can in assessing students, or is it about the effectiveness of their learning? I’d like to believe it’s about the effectiveness of their learning. ChatGPT can be a partner in learning, and it can make the learning process as important, if not more important, than the assessments are.”

As a fellow educator, I agree with Phillips’s comment that “we are going to have to learn about how the trans-disciplinary nature of knowledge works to recognise that our technologies are teaching us something about what we teach others”.

Without giving new technologies free rein to control the narrative and the evolution of their use, Phillips says we are all on a learning journey, and it behoves us to harness new ways and means to do our jobs better, to learn more effectively and to use technology to improve our lives.

AIs like ChatGPT will not replace humans, but those who use these tools will rise to the top.

So don’t panic, but recognise that of the top emerging technologies in 2023, AI headlined the list. Serious money is being poured into these technologies, which means that in a short time, LLMs will be ubiquitous, and they will disrupt your business.

The good news is that while you can’t outsmart AI, you can embrace its potential. 

About the author: Prof Manoj Chiba is the lead for the Gibs predictive analytics masterclass.

For more information on this masterclass, click here.

This article was sponsored by the Gordon Institute of Business Science.