Voiceback Analytics Managing Director Manishi Sanwal reflects on a conversation he shared with The Moodie Davitt Report Founder and Chairman Martin Moodie and explains how the products he develops can transform travel retail.
Sitting in a bar in Singapore, Martin Moodie asked me: “So what is ChatGPT and what can it do for the travel retail industry?”
Here, I attempt to de-mystify generative artificial intelligence (AI) and highlight the key emerging use-cases for the travel retail industry.
For many, the advent of generative AI is already sounding like the beginning of an apocalypse movie – on one side are the simple concerns of job losses and human productivity and, on the other, are far more serious threats to mankind and the planet.
Recently, Elon Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives released an open letter asking for a six-monthly embargo on development of AI Systems.
ChatGPT is a select branch of data technology called generative AI (Gen AI). It is only about communication in human language or natural language. It’s a sub-section of AI technologies, which refers to machines that can match or excel human intelligence.
Gen AI can understand and communicate in human language. It creates a possibility of humans directly interacting with machines. Gen AI in that sense is not a cure for all problems, but resolves and revolves only around understanding and generating human language.
The current version is special with never-seen-before capabilities, which make it mimic a human language with ease. Several things which make ChatGPT so special are its precious capabilities to:
- Comprehend and interpret human language (Natural Language Understanding – NLU)
- Determine the user’s purpose or request in each message (Intent Recognition)
- Maintain context and flow during a conversation (Dialogue Management)
- Generate human-like responses – Natural Language Generation (NLG) focuses on creating text that sounds natural and appropriate based on the context and intent
- Incorporate visual and auditory inputs and outputs to create multimodal conversational experiences (Multimodal Conversational AI).
ChatGPT is an acronym for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. The Transformer architecture is the backbone of ChatGPT, enabling its powerful language-processing capabilities.
ChatGPT is not alone. OpenAI itself has a family of algorithms for different jobs. Chat GPT has GPT, GPT 3.5 & GPT 4.0. These are upgraded versions with improved capabilities but a similar skill set – ability to understand the human language.
CODEX is a sibling of ChatGPT which focuses on writing computer programs. CODEX can convert human language to a computer program in any language you desire.
DALL.E 2 is a powerful image-generation algorithm. It can see and draw images – you can instruct it to create an image by describing what you want, and it generates it on demand. It is being used extensively by those in the creative and advertising worlds.
All’s well in Paradise?
Probably not. There are two big concerns and hurdles emerging which can impact or delay the adoption of these technologies by businesses. These are:
Hallucination
This is where a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s GPT4 or Google BARD makes up false information or facts not based on real data or events.
Two New York attorneys are facing sanctions for citing bogus cases after allegedly using ChatGPT to create a legal motion which never happened. Separately, Google AI Chat Bot gave incorrect information during its launch when it credited the James Webb telescope for discovering the first exo-planet. The first photograph of an exoplanet was taken in 2004; long before the telescope was commissioned.
This is a big issue. LLM Models, like humans, tend to lie – especially in areas where they have not been trained enough. These hallucinations, however small, become a road blocker for many implementations since a single logical error is enough to derail a much larger solution.
Data security
The second big road blocker is the concerns of data security. As industries adopt these models and start using them for more intricate purposes, a few questions emerge.
Would the enterprise data, enterprise prompts being used by one company, be exposed through the model?
As you use a ChatGPT, does it learn and could it therefore share the information with someone else?
The technology companies, however, are clearly stating the design of the systems is such that there is no leakage of vital information possible.
What’s in it for me?
LLM is a nascent industry which gained traction due to the launch and success of ChatGPT. The use cases are emerging, and industries are experimenting with places and processes. There are three broad classes of use cases (listed below) which would emerge.
1. Creative Skills
Creative skills can be channelled by marketing teams. All your content creation for social media posts can be done by a ChatGPT. Your documentation of human resources, product features, product training manuals etc. can be assisted by ChatGPT.
A lot of individuals are using ChatGPT for this and the skill set evolves from writing a social media post to writing the correct prompt to get it from ChatGPT.
2. Language Skills
The ability to read and summarise large documents is useful in many departments. It can:
- Read customer-service emails, identify the core issues, extract names and places and summarise them.
- Read customer feedback, do sentiment analysis on it, and extract key words.
- Translate languages and handle multiple language enquiries.
There are multiple instances where human written or human spoken data is being stored and analysed. Gen AI adds tremendous and quick savings in all these situations instantly.
3. ChatGPT on Enterprise Data
This is one of the strong emerging use cases. Organisations have enterprise data – this could be your training manual, customer booklets, staff training materials, product information etc. A lot of fragrances, single malt whiskies or even confectionery brands have nuanced flavours. A fragrance has top notes, middle notes, and base notes. Similarly, a malt can be from a particular region and can be peaty or fruity or spicy or with vanilla or nuts etc.
A consumer struggles to understand and your customer sales executives struggle to remember. Now imagine all your product knowledge packed in an LLM application to create a chatbot which can talk about your products. Be it the history of your brand, the flavours of your product or the recent exciting launches.
[inarticlelink image=”https://www.moodiedavittreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/James-Brown-AI-Headshot-1-768×768.jpg” heading=”How Artificial Intelligence can enhance human creativity in travel retail” summary=”Call me JAImes: In a guest article for The Moodie Davitt Report, James Brown of integrated retail marketing, design and communications agency Purple discusses the recent buzz around ChatGPT and asks whether generative AI is out to take our jobs – or just make them more efficient.” link=”https://www.moodiedavittreport.com/chat-gpt-generative-ai-how-artificial-intelligence-can-enhance-human-creativity-in-travel-retail/”]
As a retailer, one would have past data and purchase behaviour of clients. This would include information such as product preferences of the customer, last purchase date, overall frequency of visits. All this information, when packaged along with product, price and promotion information, creates a powerful engine – a bot which now knows the customer, their individual buying pattern, products available in the stores and the price, together with promotion information.
A little bit more effort and we have the perfect customised sales assistant.
It knows about the customer, about the product, about the prices and about the promotions – and it can talk in human language.
Final thoughts
This is a nascent industry and what we are seeing today are just the first waves of applications of the technology. The technology itself would improve and add more features, making it more and more suitable for adding value to your business. The business owners and their teams must understand the ethnology and be imaginative to explore avenues for productivity enhancements.
Is it even possible?
Sure, it is.
Voiceback Analytics has developed chatbot to demonstrate the potential and possibilities. The developed app has been trained on all data of a specific industry and is being used for training purposes. For more details, contact manishi@voicebackanalytics.com ✈
