Summarizing meeting notes, generating new text and providing advice on existing content – these are some of the ways IROs have put ChatGPT to use so far in their day-to-day activities, according to a recent IR Magazine Webinar held in partnership with Q4.
Panelists on the webinar urged IR professionals to get started using ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools because the potential use-cases are diverse and exciting, but also warned that these new tools must be treated with caution as the output may contain inaccuracies.
ChatGPT has proved useful for synthesizing information, said Deborah Belevan, vice president of investor relations at Duolingo. She has access to ChatGPT-4, the newest version of the chatbot, and has used it to summarize notes from an investment conference.
‘I was able to take three full pages of notes and say, Give me the four key takeaways from these meeting notes. And in three seconds, I had very crisp, clean, concise bullets that summarized everything that came out of that day’s discussion.’
Content creation
Christoph Greitemann, senior IR manager at Deutsche Telekom, said his team has used ChatGPT for creating social media posts and website text, which helps when you are struggling with a blank sheet of paper.
The proposals from ChatGPT are, ‘from what I’ve seen so far, never exactly what you need,’ Greitemann said. ‘But it’s super-helpful because it’s 80 percent [of what you want]. And the last 20 percent is what I would do manually.’
Greitemann also suggested IR teams input existing content into ChatGPT, like executive speeches and press releases, and ask what improvements it could offer. It’s ‘really fascinating and impressive what’s coming out,’ he said, although he warned against entering any confidential information.
ChatGPT has grabbed all the headlines recently but there are many other generative AI tools IROs should consider for their work, said Amit Sanghvi, global vice president of capital markets platform at Q4.
He mentioned Akkio as a tool to generate reports from datasets and SlidesAI for quickly building a slide deck around a theme. He added that the website theresanAIforthat.com contains thousands of examples of AI tools IROs can explore. ‘The fun is really when you start to apply it, whether for personal or professional use,’ he said.
Risks and limitations
Generative AI has great potential to save IROs time and help with data analysis but, currently, it also comes with risks and limitations, warned Peter Bonetta, director of CRM & investor targeting center of excellence at Q4.
‘One area where it’s still very nascent is understanding the security of the data that’s put in there,’ said Bonetta. ‘We need more information to understand how that information is processed. Who has access to that?’
He also questioned the ability of generative AI to think strategically about the future, at least for now. ‘It could be argued that, depending on the information that is fed into the model, it could be trained to do that,’ he said. ‘[But with] the current state of it, I think we’re still very early on.’
Webinar speakers agreed that now is the time for IROs to start to explore ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, if they haven’t already. ChatGPT is cheap to use – the latest version costs around $20 a month – and the more you use it, the more you will develop ‘intelligence around giving smart instructions,’ said Greitemann.
The webinar took place before the publication of a letter yesterday signed by dozens of technology leaders that called for a pause in the development of new AI tools, including anything more powerful than ChatGPT-4.
The open letter, signed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, said new AI systems are becoming ‘human-competitive at general tasks’ with the potential to ‘flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth’ and ‘automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones.’
