Business by Design

Understanding how LLMs (like ChatGPT) will change your business

Protect your business from the changes LLMs bring. Processes and practices will change, and new businesses will be created…and destroyed. Don’t let yours be the latter.

A bunch of executives sitting around a board room table with chat streams floating over their heads in the style of Erin Hanson & Moebius — via Midjourney by author

Large Language Models (LLMs), a subset of artificial intelligence that has been trained on vast quantities of text data to produce human-like responses, will disrupt many businesses and be the engine of creation for many others. Already hundreds of companies are being funded to take advantage of the technology. Many companies will be changed, and many will collapse because aspects of their business will become obsolete.

This article provides an overview of how LLMs might be used in a company and activities you should consider undertaking to evaluate LLM uses and integrations.

The basics

LLMs are good at the following use cases — The generation of content, the summarization of content, rewriting content between tones, languages, and styles, extracting content from large bodies of text, searching where the system can understand synonyms and generalizations, clustering content…often into lists, and classifying content…again, often into lists. These use cases can then be combined into more complex capabilities — Processes like looking at a list of documents, clustering them by subject, and returning a summary focusing on a particular aspect written in a specific style.

“Imagine a future where the cost of assigning every one of your individual customers a dedicated support person is essentially zero. Where a trusted member of your team is available every moment, in every channel, in every language to resolve any question the customer asks. What would be the impact to your business of offering this kind of VIP experience to every customer? … And how would being this available to your customers change the way you think about your competitive landscape?” — Mike Murchison

Rob Toews Forbes article makes a case for LLMs in business by showing how many activities — copywriting, customer email correspondence, legal contract drafting, summarizing medical notes, can…