The introduction of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has caused companies to consider its use—or whether to ban it—in the workplace, Bloomberg reported.
Forty-eight percent of human resource leaders polled by consulting firm Gartner reported that their “guidance isn't yet finalized," and 34 percent said that they did not plan to issue any guidance.
“They're probably questioning how much guidance, which roles will potentially use it or will not be able to use it, and if they should completely ban it or not,” Eser Rizaoglu, senior director analyst in the Gartner HR practice, told Bloomberg. “A lot of leaders are working with IT, legal, compliance and auditing to understand: What are the risks, what are the potential impacts? And then how do we take an approach accordingly?”
Wall Street is ambivalent about the chatbot. Financial institutions, including Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. have banned it, Bloomberg reported, while hedge fund Citadel has embraced it by negotiating an enterprisewide license.
“This branch of technology has real impact on our business,” Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities, told Bloomberg earlier this month. “Everything from helping our developers write better code to translating software between languages to analyze various types of information that we analyze in the ordinary course of our business.”
Despite the bans by some companies, 43 percent of workers surveyed by social network Fishbowl used AI tools, including ChatGPT, for work-related tasks and 68 percent of those workers did not tell their bosses. These respondents work at companies such as Amazon, Bank of America, Edelman, Google, IBM, JP Morgan, McKinsey, Meta and Nike, Twitter.
Because of the risks to accuracy, data security and privacy posed by this technology, “the diligent thing would be to assess what the potential risks are for the organization and put in some guidance accordingly to ensure that the organization is mitigating any risks that could occur later on,” Rizaoglu said.