Artificial intelligence (AI) has made concerns about machines taking people's jobs more common. But what if you could create a virtual assistant to work for you instead? OpenAI's Custom GPT feature makes that possible. It allows you to build customized AI assistants without coding and use them to support your productivity. I explained how you can create your own Custom GPT in another article. Here, I will look at how custom GPTs can support your work, drawing on insights from Ozan Ketenci's presentation at Digitalzone'23.
Artificial Intelligence Assistants Made Accessible
In the past, customized AI systems required specialist knowledge and considerable resources. You first had to collect extensive training data for the area of expertise you wanted to cover. A data science team would then spend weeks building and refining the underlying AI model.
OpenAI simplified this process. Custom GPT uses the pre-trained capabilities of GPT-4, described at the time as the most powerful AI language model. Users write instructions explaining how they want the model to work and what they want to use it for. OpenAI's technology handles much of the difficult work involved in adapting the AI to those specifications.
Within minutes, you can have an AI assistant tailored to your needs and everyday business challenges.
What could you do with a tireless AI assistant? Let's look at a few applications.
Personalised Unlimited Practices
A general-purpose AI bot such as ChatGPT has already shown that it can hold conversations and answer questions across many topics. Professional subject matter expertise is different, however, because one general model may not suit every field. A specialized GPT trained with legal resources, for example, could give a lawyer more informed guidance than a general bot.
The same principle can apply across healthcare, retail, finance, engineering, education, and many other industries. The key is to add specialized training data to the assistant's knowledge base so GPT-4 can work with information relevant to your field.
Some examples include:
- Marketing assistant optimizing campaigns by analyzing reports from your advertising platform
- Sales Representative: Recommend the best targets by pulling real-time data from CRM
- Customer Support Tool: Scan manuals and documentation to resolve customer requests
- Writing Assistant: Proofread blog posts and check SEO best practices
These examples represent only a small part of the potential use cases. As the capabilities expand and organizations add more data, Custom GPT usage could spread across a wider range of corporate roles.
Multi-Step Automations with Artificial Intelligence
Answering questions is one of the most obvious uses for AI bots. Need to check edits, analyze campaign metrics, or format structured data? Instead of searching through resources yourself, you can ask the assistant. That alone can be a major improvement over finding answers manually.
Custom GPTs can also support more substantial automation across multiple services. OpenAI's Actions framework lets you connect external APIs, browsers, databases, analysis tools, and other systems.
Combined, these connections can allow an assistant to carry out an entire multi-stage process. For example, you might want to retrieve search analytics reports from Google, email completed documents to customers every week, and save copies to cloud storage. You could define the desired outcome in detail and enable the sequence without writing the integration code yourself.
This creates a broad range of possible uses and could significantly change how organizations apply artificial intelligence.
Limitations and Growth Area
At the time of writing, Custom GPT still had room to develop before reaching its full potential. Batch processing and large API responses could sometimes overwhelm these assistants and cause them to fail. Analysts were working to improve the logic behind assistant recommendations and reduce these problems.
These limitations were not unusual for an open beta platform supporting customizable AI. Just as GPT-4 had improved in accuracy and capability over time, customized models were likely to evolve as OpenAI expanded its infrastructure and training.
For the most complex automations, expert users might still prefer OpenAI's Assistant APIs. These provide direct access for writing custom functions in Python and other languages. Custom GPT's main advantage is different: it makes AI customization available to people who cannot write code.
Build Your AI-Powered Assistants
AI assistants could change how many workplace roles operate. These tools can bring organizational knowledge into everyday decisions while reducing the burden of repetitive administrative work.
People who adopted Custom GPT early to improve their productivity could gain an advantage over colleagues who continued using older methods. You can begin by building a simple personalized AI tool that fits your existing workflow, then develop it over time to handle more complex tasks.
You can read my detailed blog post to take the first step toward an AI-supported workplace.
This content was created by Ahmet Can Kavak, Marketing Manager at Zeo.
