AI on the Job: Get ready to meet your AI assistant

Artificial intelligence is already hard at work in some sectors, not to replace expensive human employees, but instead to make jobs a whole lot easier. AI is helping people do their jobs by making some tasks more efficient, eliminating other tasks altogether and even injecting a creative boost into their workflow.  

That’s how Matthew Hitcham uses ChatGPT, the online chatbot made by OpenAI. Hitcham is an AI entrepreneur with his own digital marketing agency. He said he uses ChatGPT “at least a couple of hours per day” to help with writing video scripts, social media content and emails for clients.

“I may do things like have 40% done and I can’t think of a way to finish something,” Hitcham said. “So, I’ll ask it to give me five different options as to how I can finish this sentence or how I can finish this video, and it will do that.”

In March, economists at Goldman Sachs predicted AI could expose about 300 million jobs to automation. Their report also found that about a quarter of existing work could already be done by AI, particularly in the legal industry.

That’s exactly where Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, sees his company’s AI tool for lawyers fitting in. It’s called CoCounsel.

“I think there will be certain tasks that lawyers won’t do anymore or will do far less of in the future,” Heller said. “I think for a lot of those tasks, lawyers will say, ‘Good riddance.’”

Tasks like document review, writing legal memos and analyzing contracts are examples of duties lawyers might pass off to an AI tool.

For Heller, this trend goes beyond his company’s product for the legal industry.

“I think every single professional is going to have an AI assistant supporting them in their work sometime over the next five years,” Heller said. “I think it’s going to become ubiquitous.”

That’s how Joe Gibson, managing attorney for the Employment Law Center of Maryland, uses CoCounsel.

“It definitely functions like an assistant,” Gibson said. “It does assist me in performing my job duties faster, better than I could before.”

But despite this tool’s impressive capabilities, Gibson said he’s not worried about AI replacing human lawyers anytime soon. But if it does, “I could use a vacation,” he said.

“It really augments our capabilities as lawyers,” Gibson said about CoCounsel, but “it can’t replace it. You can’t put it on autopilot, you can’t trust it entirely. You still have to use your brain.”  

In the meantime, Matthew Hitcham sees an opportunity not just in using AI as an assistant, but creating AI assistants for others to use.

“The way that people are really going to make money using ChatGPT at the moment is via the [application programming interface] and creating plugins,” Hitcham said. “Automating tasks and creating virtual assistants in specific categories, apps like that, that’s where the money is. That’s where the billionaires will be made.”

Eliminate the tedious parts of your job while the money rolls in? Sounds like nice work, if you can get it.