The AI revolution_

The spotlight is on ChatGPT as AI seeks to reshape the world.

> We look at some of the first steps companies are taking to harness this new, now not-so-secret weapon to supercharge their business.

By John Forcucci

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT, has become a household name. In the space of a few months, ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022, has taken the world by storm — including many corners of the insurance and financial services industries. Currently ChatGPT is all possibility, with many seeking to understand the reality of its capabilities — and its shortcomings.

The popularity of AI generative programs such as ChatGPT also can be seen in the sudden arrival of competitors, all long in the works but suddenly thrust into the spotlight due to ChatGPT’s notoriety. Google has launched Bard, to initial mixed reviews. Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, has launched Make-A-Video, an AI system that generates videos from text, and is planning other projects.

Others include IBM, with Watson, and Tesla. Essentially, there is a war taking place to see who will win the top spot in the AI world, much as Google won the search engine war years ago.

As the initial examination of these systems goes forward at high speed, many in the industry are trying it out. Their experiences inevitably have brought benefits, especially in the areas of idea generation, time savings and, to some extent, research, as well as in expediting mundane tasks including content outlines, editorial calendars, content briefs, FAQs, social media captioning and even search engine optimization.

We talked to some in the industry who have started kicking the tires of ChatGPT for these and other uses, as the power of generative AI becomes a time-saver, an ideation tool and, in some cases, an “assistant” for content teams.

‘An indispensable tool’

“In the fast-paced world of insurance marketing, AI has become an indispensable tool for creating compelling content,” said Greta Matiash , chief marketing officer and life insurance agent at Pivotal Insurance. “I rely on ChatGPT to generate ideas, kick-start blogs and create social media captions. With its ability to provide a range of options and suggest commonly used SEO keywords, ChatGPT is a valuable asset in our content creation process. It even helps build out a content calendar for the month, which we can then customize to fit our events and timeline.

“However, it’s important to note that AI is just one part of the equation,” she said. “We still rely on fact-checking, research and customization to ensure that our content is unique, accurate and tailored to our audiences’ needs. AI is a powerful tool, but it’s the human touch that truly brings our content to life.”

“We will create blog posts, which are often informational content,” explained Ron Wadley, insurance agent and owner at Insurance for Texans Group, based in Bedford, Texas. “The blog posts will be about relevant topics of the day in insurance. What we have found over the last five years is if we are creating content around the questions and concerns that we hear our prospects and customers talking about, there are lots of other people that have those same questions and concerns. We create content around those items. It can be video, blog entries or information for our site.

“That all will get pushed to social channels, but if it’s on our website first, the SEO will generate traffic. Traffic begets leads and leads beget customers, which ultimately ends up in revenue for the business. We had done a lot of that through brute force over the last five years. Over the last 18 months, we were using Jasper and some other AI tools before we started using ChatGPT.

“One of the things that we’ve found with the AI tools and ChatGPT in particular is that if I have a question, I can first use ChatGPT to create an outline. I’ll ask ChatGPT, what kind of framework do I want to use? What are some key points that I want to make sure that I include? Our secondary piece of software that we use, called Frase. io, allows us to pull in things like headers, titles, key points that other high-ranking websites are using. We marry those two sources together to come up with a framework of what we want our content to look like.”

Frase.io, Wadley said, has some “algorithms that are built into their software that allows me to juice up things for SEO purposes.”

Wadley said he has found that ChatGPT is by no means perfect.

“If you don’t have some amount of subject matter knowledge, you will 100% get your behind burned. If you’re asking about what makes the sky blue, it’s probably going to get that mostly right. When you’re talking about the intricacies of insurance and financial services, it can be a very detailed answer. And if it has not been fed the right information, it could absolutely be wrong.”

Wadley said because conditions on policies in one state can be completely different from conditions in another state, “you have that regionality issue that can be in play. For example, I live in hail country, and what goes on here is vastly different than what you see in coastal Oregon, where they don’t have hail.

ChatGPT doesn’t know that, so you have to have some amount of subject matter knowledge to be able to leverage it: Is this giving me the right outline? Is this giving me the right things to consider?”

Because of the possible errors, Wadley said he’s wary of using ChatGPT to author complete articles that he would publish. “You can use it — and we have — to write an introduction, maybe a transition between two items. I tested something about health insurance the other day. I had it create an outline and then I had it write a full-blown article. It was 2,200 words and had a great SEO optimization score. I am scared to death to publish that.” To publish something written by ChatGPT, said Wadley, “you’re going to have to fact-check.”

Rayne Morgan, a content marketing manager with Policy Advisor, based in Vancouver, B.C., said that her team is leery of using ChatGPT for authoring complete pieces of content, too.

“We are using it for content, for social media, but also for our blog website