Azure OpenAI Service.
ChatGPT and generative AI has the capability to significantly improve the way we work and transform the digital workplace, potentially revolutionising certain business processes and turbocharging productivity. At Content Formula we can help your organisations unlock the many business benefits Azure OpenAI service has to offer.
The Azure OpenAI service is part of Azure Cognitive Services, a series of AI-powered intelligent services that enables powerful features within custom applications covering multiple use cases such as translation, speech to text, sentiment analysis, image recognition and more.
The Azure OpenAI allows developers access via an API to the Large Language Model that powers ChatGPT, the latest being GPT 4. This means you can create an application that sends data to leverage the powerful model behind ChatGPT and then return it back to your application, effectively bringing the power of generative AI to your own internal business solutions.
Microsoft states that the service can be leveraged for “your specific task including but not limited to content generation, summarisation, semantic search and natural language to code translation.” This means you could use Azure OpenAI services to deliver highly intelligent and efficient applications suited to your custom needs across a wide range of use cases.
The Azure OpenAI service has a number of key features including:
- REST APIs to access the service as well as a Python-based Software Development Kit (SDK) to support developers.
- The ability to leverage the GPT 3.5 or GPT 4 Large Language Models, the latest model (4) being more expensive to use.
- The ability to leverage DALL-E, an AI-powered image generator based on natural language text input by a user. (Note this feature is only currently in preview).
- The Azure OpenAI Service Studio, a web-based interface to help use the Azure OpenAI service for exploring models and then fine-tuning them.
- The ability to leverage Microsoft’s framework for responsible AI that helps guard against the misuse of the service, and supporting ethical use and governance.
- Ensuring that data fed into the service remains within your Microsoft tenant, a critical element that reduces risks currently associated with using ChatGPT.
Forward thinking organisations are already beginning to work with AI and AI-powered tools to deliver and improve their digital workplace.
There are several benefits from using the Azure OpenAI service including:
Minimise risk and stay in control
One of the problems with using the public version of ChatGPT and generative AI in general is that it comes with a number of risks including safeguarding data privacy, protecting intellectual property, exhibiting bias, questionable accuracy and more. For this reason, many organisations are extremely nervous about using ChatGPT and other generative AI services.
Leveraging Azure OpenAI Services side steps many of these risk issues as all data stays within your Microsoft 365 tenant so there are far less concerns, at least around protecting intellectual property and data privacy.
Stay competitive
Many organisations are actively working out how they can use ChatGPT and generative AI to develop new ways of working, transform processes and create services. This is an area where there is going to exponential change and rapid innovation.
Starting on the journey now and experimenting with services and applications based on Azure OpenAI services will help organisations to maintain a competitive edge against their rivals, as well as learn how best to use generative AI in order to drive value going forward.
Transform internal processes and maximise productivity
Azure OpenAI services allow you to create custom applications that are truly wrapped around the way you work. This means you can transform internal processes in a very targeted ways that can truly revolutionise productivity and potentially make a huge difference to the way people work.
Using the AzureOpenAI Service enables you to build a different range of business applications across your digital workplace. Here, the potential use cases are very wide, but here are three early examples that we have already been having conversations with clients about.
Intelligent content generation
The potential to generate content from scratch is one of the most powerful aspects of ChatGPT and generative AI. Leveraging OpenAI services to build custom applications means an organisation may be able to generate intelligent content for specific business processes that incorporates organisational branding, collateral and methodologies.
For example, this could involve building presentations and reports that a consultant or employee can then customise and complete. This has the potential to save huge amounts of time while also ensuring content is on-brand.
Advanced chatbots
Chatbots that answer employee questions around HR, IT and other business services help promote self-service and take the pressure off busy helpdesks. Although chatbots are now relatively mature within the digital workplace, the results are not always as good as organisations have hoped and they require a lot of training and content preparation.
Using the OpenAI service has the opportunity to significantly improve service-related chatbots with more sophisticated responses, reduce the time to market with less need for training, and also guide users to the right resources such as policies.
Summaries and tagging
AI has often been mooted as a way to support content management processes across the digital workplace as well as external websites, for example providing automated tagging suggestions for content owners, creating summaries of pages, documents or meetings, and even starting to build up pages that draw content from different sources.
ChatGPT has the potential to support better content management by automating or partly-automating tagging, summaries and more in ways that are simply more accurate and valuable.
A SharePoint intranet brings together the entire hybrid workforce regardless of whether they're office-based, remote or frontline workers.
At Content Formula we are already helping organisations to get started with Azure OpenAI services, so that they can benefit from the many opportunities it has to offer.
AI has the power to significantly transform and improve many aspects of the digital workplace, from working processes through to knowledge management, communication and culture.
To ensure your organisation is evolving and maintaining a competitive advantage, we recommend getting started with experimentation as soon as possible.