Treating GPTs as a sandpit: How your personal interests can help your professional use of genAI

My approach to learning how to get the most out of generative AI, including understanding its limitations and how to work around them, is to experiment as much as possible - on low-risk use cases.

In fact, it's often a highly valuable learning experience to work on a topic only indirectly related to your professional role. Typically there is a lot of discovery that comes out of this process that applies to the world of work as well.

Here are some of the GPTs I have made since OpenAI launched the ability to create them:

- One for career planning (because I thought it would help the LinkedIn community),

- One for change management (this is directly related to my work),

- One for mental health (this is an area of non-professional interest),

- One that turns your dishwasher manual into a chat-based experience (because I bought a new dishwasher and it took a while to find all the information I needed).

Let's take the last one. I can now ask any question and get a direct answer, without having to wade through pages and pages of text and diagrams.

There were some challenges getting it to visualise buttons/symbols (which it can't do), but I discovered a workaround. Now even in the worst case scenario, I have tool that will tell me exactly which page of the manual I need to go to. And in the best case, I never need to open the manual again.

Imagine if white goods manufacturers (like the wonderful Miele) put this into practice at scale. It could be combined with the ability to output images, or do voice-voice dialogue exactly as the ChatGPT app does (and if you haven't tried that yet you should - it's a subtle but powerful difference to text-text or voice-text.)

Extending this on a more abstract level, imagine this capability hooked up to Zalando's catalogue. Wouldn't it be a far better shopping experience to simply speak your clothing desires, and have a hyper-personalised digital assistant speak back to you while showing you carefully curated options on screen?

These scenarios are just a matter of time. And based on what can be achieved in minutes with a consumer-grade GPT, I would say it's not too far away.