Successfully implementing ChatGPT in your company
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Save time, increase efficiency. Using ChatGPT in your company can bring many benefits for employees and managers alike. Those who work with it quickly realise how fast and effective GPT-3 is. Used correctly, ChatGPT can make everyday work in companies more sustainable. But as with any technology, there are opportunities and risks. Read on to find out what these are and how you can use ChatGPT successfully.
The most important information in brief
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What are the benefits? ChatGPT for businesses automates time-consuming routine tasks such as email correspondence, customer service responses, and technical documentation.
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Where is it worth using? The use cases are diverse and range from intelligent "personal assistants" to coding support in IT and error analysis in production.
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Why is good data essential? AI is only as good as its input. Unstructured or incorrect data leads to incorrect answers (hallucinations).
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Is my data secure? Be careful with the public version—it is often unsuitable for confidential company data (US server). Isolated environments such as GPT on Azure offer alternatives that comply with data protection regulations.
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Can AI make decisions on its own? No. Despite high text quality, the human-in-the-loop principle applies: subject matter experts must perform a final check of the output.
Whitepaper: Talking to your data
Our white paper explains how you can use GPT to get the most out of your company data and thus ensure your success.
What exactly is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence-based language model developed by the US company OpenAI. Technically, it is a "Generative Pre-trained Transformer" (GPT), a special form of Large Language Models (LLM). These models use machine learning to conduct human-like conversations, generate text, and solve complex tasks in a dialogue format.
Currently, ChatGPT is primarily used by companies to:
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Develop user-friendly chatbots and voice assistants.
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Respond to customer service inquiries automatically.
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Generate texts and work on problems in a solution-oriented manner.
How can ChatGPT help businesses?
For businesses, using ChatGPT primarily means increased productivity through the automation of routine text-based tasks. Before we get to specific use cases, here are the work processes with the greatest leverage:
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Customer service: Automated response to inquiries and 24/7 support.
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Knowledge management: Internal document searches and preparation of company knowledge.
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Content creation: Drafts for marketing, emails, or reports.
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Technical support: Step-by-step instructions and troubleshooting.
The quality of the output depends largely on your input data.
Whitepaper: Bringing GPT to your business
We explain how GPT can be used in practice within companies in our white paper.
Erfolgreiche Use Cases: ChatGPT in Unternehmen nutzen
Wer ChatGPT für Unternehmen einsetzt, zielt meist auf konkrete Effizienzsteigerungen in spezifischen Abteilungen ab. Nachfolgend finden Sie praxiserprobte Anwendungsfälle, in denen KI bereits heute Arbeitsprozesse beschleunigt:
Personal Assistant & Office Management
Scenario: The AI assistant acts as a “second brain” for employees. It not only manages calendars, but also prepares unstructured data for presentations and summarizes long meeting minutes.
Benefit: Information is immediately available in the desired format, which significantly reduces the administrative workload.
Customer Management & Field Service
Scenario: Service technicians or call center agents cannot memorize every technical detail of complex products (e.g., household appliances).
Benefit: An integrated chatbot provides step-by-step repair instructions and suggested solutions on demand. In the future, this bot will also be able to handle end customer inquiries (first-level support) directly.
Shop floor & production
Scenario: In noisy production halls, typing questions into terminals is often impractical.
Benefit: By combining ChatGPT with speech-to-text, technicians can ask the machine status questions verbally. The answer is delivered via text-to-speech directly to the headphones – ideal for hands-free maintenance work.
Engineering & Documentation
Scenario: Engineers spend a lot of time on reports and data sheets. GPT tools automate the creation of technical documentation and, more importantly, the updating of existing instructions.
Benefit: Manual transfers are eliminated; documents are automatically updated based on new data inputs.
Development & Quality Analysis
Scenario: In vehicle or plant development, AI analyzes historical quality databases to identify patterns for new platforms.
Benefits: When clustering and categorizing large amounts of data, ChatGPT is often superior to traditional topic detection methods in terms of speed and accuracy.
Market research
GPT-based analytics platforms link raw survey results with user data to directly derive effective communication strategies.
Challenges and risks in corporate use
Using ChatGPT in your company offers enormous opportunities, but requires awareness of specific risks. Before rolling out AI on a large scale, you should evaluate these three hurdles:
Data protection and confidentiality
ChatGPT (in the standard version) processes data on US servers and potentially uses inputs to train future models.
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The risk: Sensitive company data, trade secrets, or personal customer data could be permanently stored in the AI's memory and theoretically retrieved at a later date.
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Recommendation: The public web version is often unsuitable for internal or confidential data. Instead, use enterprise solutions or API connections (such as GPT on Azure) that guarantee data security by contract.
Hallucinations (factual certainty)
Language models are trained to give answers that sound plausible, not necessarily true ones.
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The risk: AI can freely invent ("hallucinate") facts, sources, or technical details and present them in a completely convincing manner.
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Recommendation: Establish a "human-in-the-loop" strategy. Technical content must be reviewed by experts before it is sent to customers.
Copyright
The legal situation regarding AI-generated content is still dynamic in many countries.
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The risk: It is often unclear whether AI texts can be protected by copyright or whether you are unknowingly infringing the rights of third parties contained in the training data set by using them.
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Recommendation: Label AI content internally and clarify its use for critical assets (e.g., logos, claims) in advance with legal counsel.
Should I use ChatGPT in my company?
Whether ChatGPT or GPT on Azure is suitable for your company can depend on several factors. For example:
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Suitable use cases: What are the areas of application for ChatGPT in your company? Where can ChatGPT be used to its fullest potential?
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Good data & quality: If your company data is unstructured, outdated, or incorrect, ChatGPT will provide inconsistent answers or invent facts (so-called hallucinations). A clean, digitally available database is therefore an essential technical prerequisite for success.
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Data protection: The protection of sensitive, critical, and unpublished data must always be taken into account. In this case, it may be advisable to use a GPT solution instead of ChatGPT.
From experiment to strategy: your next step
The path to becoming an AI-supported company does not begin with large IT projects, but with valid experiments. Instead of immediately rolling out ChatGPT across the entire company, we recommend the following approach:
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Identify: Find a specific process (e.g., first-level support or documentation) that takes up a lot of time.
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Validate: Test feasibility with non-critical data in a protected environment (proof of concept).
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Scaling: For productive use, switch to secure enterprise environments such as Azure OpenAI to guarantee data protection and compliance.
Whitepaper: Talking to your data
FAQs about ChatGPT in business
Will my company data be used to train the AI?
When using ChatGPT in the standard way: Yes. OpenAI openly states that entered data and interactions can be used to train new model variants. Sensitive or confidential company data should therefore never be entered into the public version, as it could theoretically appear in future model generations.Is ChatGPT suitable for internal corporate use?
The public version of ChatGPT is primarily designed for private users. Since prompts are often logged on US servers and data usage for training purposes may be enabled by default, the tool is often unsuitable for internal or confidential B2B applications from a compliance perspective.
Is there a data protection-compliant alternative for my company?
Yes, Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service offers a solution here. Microsoft hosts the GPT models in Europe (EU) and operates in compliance with the GDPR and the Azure Data Protection Addendum.What is the difference between ChatGPT and GPT on Azure?
Although the Azure OpenAI Service uses the same language models, it runs completely isolated within your company's Azure infrastructure. No OpenAI APIs are used. Microsoft guarantees that the data will not leave its own cloud environment and—if configured correctly—no inputs will be logged or used for AI training.
Kyrill Schmid is Lead AI Engineer in the Data and AI division at MaibornWolff. The machine learning expert, who holds a doctorate, specialises in identifying, developing and harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence at the enterprise level. He guides and supports organisations in developing innovative AI solutions such as agent applications and RAG systems.