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Artificial intelligence is no longer limited to the realm of science-fiction novels it's increasingly becoming a part of our everyday lives.

AI chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, are already being used in a variety of ways, from writing emails to booking trips. In fact, ChatGPT amassed over 100 million users within just months of launching.

But AI goes beyond large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Microsoft defines AI as "the capability of a computer system to mimic human-like cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving."

For example, self-driving cars use AI to simulate the decision-making processes a human driver would usually make while on the road such as identifying traffic signals or choosing the best route to reach a given destination, according to Microsoft.

AI's boom in popularity has many companies racing to integrate the technology into their own products. In fact, 94% of business leaders believe that AI development will be critical to the success of their business over the next five years, according to Deloitte's latest survey.

For consumers, this means AI may be coming to a store, restaurant or supermarket nearby. Here are four companies that are already utilizing AI's capabilities and how it may impact you.

Amazon delivery package seen in front of a door.

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Amazon uses AI in a number of ways, but one strategy aims to get your orders to you faster, Stefano Perego, vice president of customer fulfilment and global ops services for North America and Europe at Amazon, told CNBC on Monday.

The company's "regionalization" plan involves shipping products from warehouses that are closest to customers rather than from a warehouse located in a different part of the country.

To do that, Amazon is utilizing AI to analyze data and patterns to determine where certain products are in demand. This way, those products can be stored in nearby warehouses in order to reduce delivery times.

Screens displaying the logos of Microsoft and ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence application software developed by OpenAI.

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Microsoft is putting its $13 billion investment in OpenAI to work. In March, the tech behemoth announced that a new set of AI features, dubbed Copilot, will be added to its Microsoft 365 software, which includes popular apps such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word.

When using Word, for example, Copilot will be able to produce a "first draft to edit and iterate on saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time," Microsoft says. But Microsoft acknowledges that sometimes this type of AI software can produce inaccurate responses and warns that "sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong."

A Brain Corp. autonomous floor scrubber, called an Auto-C, cleans the aisle of a Walmart's store. Sam's Club completed the rollout of roughly 600 specialized scrubbers with inventory scan towers last October in a partnership Brain Corp.

Source: Walmart

Walmart is using AI to make sure shelves in its nearly 4,700 stores and 600 Sam's Clubs stay stocked with your favorite products. One way it's doing that: automated floor scrubbers.

As the robotic scrubbers clean Sam's Club aisles, they also capture images of every item in the store to monitor inventory levels. The inventory intelligence towers located on the scrubbers take more than 20 million photos of the shelves every day.

The company has trained its algorithms to be able to tell the difference between brands and determine how much of the product is on the shelf with more than 95% accuracy, Anshu Bhardwaj, senior vice president of Walmart's tech strategy and commercialization, told CNBC in March. And when a product gets too low, the stock room is automatically alerted to replenish it, she said.

A customer waits at a drive-thru outside a Wendys Co. restaurant in El Sobrante, California, U.S.

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An AI chatbot may be taking your order when you pull up to a Wendy's drive-thru in the near future.

The fast-food chain partnered with Google to develop an AI chatbot specifically designed for drive-thru ordering, Wendy's CEO Todd Penegor told CNBC last week. The goal of this new feature is to speed up ordering at the speaker box, which is "the slowest point in the order process," the CEO said.

In June, Wendy's plans to test the first pilot of its "Wendy's FreshAI" at a company-operated restaurant in the Columbus, Ohio area, according to a May press release.

Powered by Google Cloud's generative AI and large language models, it will be able to have conversations with customers, understand made-to-order requests and generate answers to frequently asked questions, according to the company's statement.

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From Amazon to Wendy's, how 4 companies plan to incorporate AIand how you may interact with it - CNBC

After ChatGPT burst on the scene last November, some government officials raced to prohibit its use. Italybanned the chatbot. New York City, Los Angeles Unified, Seattle, and Baltimore School Districts eitherbanned or blocked access to generative AI tools, fearing that ChatGPT, Bard, and other content generation sites could tempt students to cheat on assignments, induce rampant plagiarism, and impede critical thinking. This week, US Congressheard testimony from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and AI researcher Gary Marcus as it weighed whether and how to regulate the technology.

In a rapid about-face, however, a few governments are now embracing a less fearful and more hands-on approach to AI. New York City Schools chancellor David Banksannounced yesterday that NYC is reversing its ban because the knee jerk fear and risk overlooked the potential of generative AI to support students and teachers, as well as the reality that our students are participating in and will work in a world where understanding generative AI is crucial. And yesterday, City of Boston chief information officer Santiago Garces sentguidelines to every city official encouraging them to start using generative AI to understand their potential. The city also turned on use of Google Bard as part of the City of Bostons enterprise-wide use of Google Workspace so that all public servants have access.

The responsible experimentation approach adopted in Bostonthe first policy of its kind in the UScould, if used as a blueprint, revolutionize the public sectors use of AI across the country and cause a sea change in how governments at every level approach AI. By promoting greater exploration of how AI can be used to improve government effectiveness and efficiency, and by focusing on how to use AI for governance instead of only how to govern AI, the Boston approach might help to reduce alarmism and focus attention on how to use AI for social good.

Bostons policy outlines several scenarios in which public servants might want to use AI to improve how they work, and even includes specific how-tos for effective prompt writing.

Generative AI, city officials were told in an email that went out from the CIO to all city officials on May 18, is a great way to get started on memos, letters, and job descriptions, and might help to alleviate the work of overburdened public officials.

The tools can also help public servants translate government-speak and legalese into plain English, which can make important information about public services more accessible to residents. The policy explains that public servants can indicate the reading level or audience in the prompt, allowing the AI model to generate text suitable for elementary school students or specific target audiences.

Generative AI can also help with translation into other languages so that a citys non-English speaking populations can enjoy equal and easier access to information about policies and services affecting them.

City officials were also encouraged to use generative AI tosummarize lengthy pieces of text or audio into concise summaries, which could make it easier for government officials to engage in conversations with residents.

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Boston Isn't Afraid of Generative AI - WIRED

Books

Publisher says cover of House of Earth and Blood was prepared by in-house designers unaware the stock image chosen was not human-made

Fri 19 May 2023 10.30 EDT

Publisher Bloomsbury has said it was unaware an image it used on the cover of a book by fantasy author Sarah J Maas was generated by artificial intelligence.

The paperback of Maass House of Earth and Blood features a drawing of a wolf, which Bloomsbury had credited to Adobe Stock, a service that provides royalty-free images to subscribers.

But the Verge reported that the illustration of the wolf matches one created by a user on Adobe Stock called Aperture Vintage, who has marked the image as AI-generated.

A number of illustrators and fans have criticised the cover for using AI, but Bloomsbury has said it was unaware of the images origin.

Bloomsburys in-house design team created the UK paperback cover of House of Earth and Blood, and as part of this process we incorporated an image from a photo library that we were unaware was AI when we licensed it, said Bloomsbury in a statement. The final cover was fully designed by our in-house team.

This is not the first time that a book cover from a major publishing house has used AI. In 2022, sci-fi imprint Tor discovered that a cover it had created had used a licensed image created by AI, but decided to go ahead anyway due to production constraints.

And this month Bradford literature festival apologised for the hurt caused after artists criticised it for using AI-generated images on promotional material.

Meanwhile, sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld, which publishes science fiction short stories, was forced to close itself to submissions after a deluge of entries generated by AI.

The publishing industry is more broadly grappling with the use and role of AI. It has led to the Society of Authors (SoA) issuing a paper on artificial intelligence, in which it said that while there are potential benefits of machine learning, there are risks that need to be assessed, and safeguards need to be put in place to ensure that the creative industries will continue to thrive.

The SoA has advised that consent should be sought from creators before their work is used by an AI system, and that developers should be required to publish the data sources they have used to train their AI systems.

The guidance addresses concerns similar to those raised by illustrators and artists who spoke to the Guardian earlier this year about the way in which AI image generators use databases of already existing art and text without the creators permission.

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Bloomsbury admits using AI-generated artwork for Sarah J Maas novel - The Guardian

AZEEM AZHAR: Hi there, Im Azeem Azhar. For the past decade, Ive studied exponential technologies, their emergence, rapid uptake, and the opportunities they create. I wrote a book about this in 2021. Its called The Exponential Age. Even with my expertise, I sometimes find it challenging to keep up with the fast pace of change in the field of artificial intelligence, and thats why Im excited to share a series of weekly insights with you, where we can delve into some of the most intriguing questions about AI. In todays reflection, I look at an insightful research note from Goldman Sachs, titled The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth, in which the authors explore the labor markets future. The study posits that global productivity could see an impressive uptick, ultimately boosting global GDP by 7%. And I wonder, where will the jobs come from after AI? Lets dig in.

The headline finding was that productivity globally could eventually rise, and you could see a rise in global GDP by 7%, which is no slouch. There were also models that showed that US economic growth could jump from that one to one and a half percent anemic level, up to two and a half, three percent, the sorts of levels that were enjoyed during those halcyon period of the 1950s, which is all pretty exciting. But what I thought was quite interesting was how the researchers dug into the impact on the workforce from all of these productivity changes. So they found some quite interesting findings. I suspect if youve been reading the newsletter thinking about these things, you wouldnt be too surprised by them. But lets just go through them because theyre numerical and theyre quite useful.

So, they found that about two thirds of US occupations were exposed to some degree of automation by AI, and a significant share of those had quite a substantial part share of their workload that could be replaced. So running from healthcare supports down the bottom end to health practices, computer and IT sales and management, finance, legal and office admin, you saw that between on average 25% of tasks to 46% of tasks in the case of office admin could be automated with a much larger impact in general in developed markets than in emerging markets. Its pretty interesting because the researchers suggest, and I think this is a kind of reasonable assertion, that if a job would find about 50% or more of its tasks being automated, it would lend itself to being replaced. Whereas jobs that might have 10 to about 49% of their tasks automated lend themselves to using AI as a sort of complement to the human worker.

Ive looked at this question over the last several years, youve probably read a number of those things, and the question is, what might that actually mean as it plays out? So what we found historically is that when new technologies come around, the firms that make use of them tend to be able to grow their headcount, they grow their employment levels, and its the firms that dont use those technologies that tend to lose out. I talk about this in my book. I have the parable of the two men, Indrek and Fred, who are walking in the Canadian wilds and they stop to take a break. They take their shoes off and a grizzly bear approaches them and one of them pops his shoes on and the other says, Why are you putting your shoes on? Youll never outrun the grizzly bear. And his friend says, I dont need to outrun the grizzly bear, I just need to outrun you.

And that of course, is a competitive dynamic. The firms that are well managed, that can manage these new technologies, that make the investment will perform better, as better performing firms always have, and theyll grow, and in the competitive space that will come at the cost to the underperforming firms. So that should create the kind of incentive for companies to invest in these technology. But they wont do evenly. So we will see some winners and well see some losers.

Wed also expect to see widespread downward wage pressure because these jobs are essentially being able to be done more efficiently. So, a smaller number of people potentially could be required. The other thing to wonder is the extent to which this would necessarily lead to job cuts. And you could say, Look, firms wont do this. These are well paid workers, 80k, 100k, 150k or more a year. And they will be protected in some sense for a certain period of time. But even the most protective firms come to really think about their workforces have gone into cost-cutting mode in the last few months, like McKinsey and Google. And its hard to imagine economy-wide that in this type of economy, the opportunity to streamline and be efficient wont be quite tempting for management.

So, the question is, where might those cuts fall in the firm? I have a hunch, and its no more than that, that if you are a manager in a largish, medium size, or even a sort of bigger end of the small firm, it will be quite appealing to look at the middle of your employment base. Because what you have there is you have people who are quite well paid but are not your top leadership. And the temptation will be to go in and thin those ranks, not so far that you deplete all the tacit knowledge and all the sort of socialized information in the firm, the stuff that isnt codified, but enough to cut costs on the basis that AI-enabled juniors working with a small number of well-trained, experienced, more senior professionals will be able to fill in the gaps. And I suspect that will be a kind of tempting strategy for companies as we move on. And that in a sense is a kind of extension of the delayering of firms that we saw when it started to get rolled out in the 1980s and 1990s.

But what about this 7% productivity growth? So, thats got to be doing something. The economy is going to be growing much faster than it was before, and its going to create new opportunities and new needs. Theres a great survey that the Goldman Sachs authors quote from David Orta. He is this amazing economist, and he points out that 85% of employment growth in the US in the last 80 years has been in jobs that didnt exist in 1940 when the period started. So, we know effectively that the economy creates new work, new classes of work very well, although over an 80-year period. And the thing is that if these technologies are going to be rolled out overnight to millions of workers, the impact will be felt quite fast.

I mean, just take a look at lawyers. Therere somewhere between 700,000 lawyers in the US, if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, or 1.3 million, if you look at the American Bar Association data. Sorry, I dont know the real number. But based on Goldmans estimates, about 40% of those jobs could be up for being replaced. So thats between 250 and 500,000 people. So, the question is not will new jobs be ultimately created. Its when do they get created in the sort of short time that is available? And we can imagine that new sorts of roles emerge that are complementary to the AI tools that get layered in, ones that are syncretic across the specialist expertise of being a particular type of admin or being a particular type of legal profession, and what is now required to make these technologies work. So, that would be one area.

The second is that the growing economy is going to raise the demand in complementary services, which is what you would expect from economic growth. And of course, there are these new sectors like the bioeconomy and the green economy that are developing rapidly and are being stimulated by things like, in the US, the Inflation Reduction Act, and similar sorts of things in the EU and UK, which should create a demand for new types of private sector jobs.

But its a really hard conundrum because how do you re-skill people? How do you ensure that they actually want to make the move? How do you make sure that they have the resources and the emotional psychological capabilities to make the move? And how do you make sure the jobs that are created are in the places where the people actually live? And I say all of this because I know that is material that weve heard before, but I dont get a sense that I see really strong and solid [inaudible 00:08:14] and interventions, and these are the types of things that need to come from government to tackle what could well be a very sharp transition as these productivity enhancing tools start to get rolled out.

Well, thanks for tuning in. If you want to truly grasp the ins and outs of AI, visit http://www.exponentialview.co, where I share expert insights with hundreds of thousands of leaders each week.

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Azeem on AI: Where Will the Jobs Come from After AI? - HBR.org Daily

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks on-stage during the Google I/O keynote session at the Google Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.

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Google's effort to rapidly add new artificial intelligence technology into its core products is making its way into the advertising world, CNBC has learned.

The company has given the green light to plans for using generative AI, fueled by large language models (LLMs), to automate advertising and ad-supported consumer services, according to internal documents.

Last week, Google unveiled PaLM 2, its latest and most powerful LLM, trained on reams of text data that can come up with human-like responses to questions and commands. Certain groups within Google are now planning to use PaLM 2-powered tools to allow advertisers to generate their own media assets and to suggest videos for YouTube creators to make, documents show.

Google has also been testing PaLM 2 for YouTube youth content for things like titles, and descriptions. For creators, the company has been using the technology to experiment with the idea of providing five video ideas based on topics that appear relevant.

With the AI chatbot craze speedily racing across the tech industry and capturing the fascination of Wall Street, Google and its peers, including Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, are rushing to embed their most sophisticated models in as many products as possible. The urgency has been particularly acute at Google since the public launch late last year of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT raised concern that the future of internet search was suddenly up for grabs.

Meanwhile, Google has been mired in a multi-quarter stretch of muted revenue growth after almost two decades of consistent and rapid expansion. With fears of a recession building since last year, advertisers have been reeling in online marketing budgets, wreaking havoc on Google,Facebookand others. Specific to Google, paid search advertising conversion rates have decreased this year across most industries.

Beyond search, email and spreadsheets, Google wants to use generative AI offerings to increase spending to boost revenue and improve margins, according to the documents. An AI-powered customer support strategy could potentially run across more than 100 Google products, including, Google Play Store, Gmail, Android Search and Maps, the documents show.

Automated support chatbots could provide specific answers through simple, clear sentences and allow for follow-up questions to be asked before suggesting an advertising plan that would best suit an inquiring customer.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Google recently offered Google Duet and Chat assistance,allowing people to use simple natural language to get answers on cloud-related questions, such as how to use certain cloud services or functions, or to get detailed implementation plans for their projects.

Google is also working on its own internal Stable Diffusion-like product for image creation, according to the documents. Stable Diffusion's technology, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E, can quickly render images in various styles with text-based direction from the user.

Google's plan to push its latest AI models into advertising isn't a surprise. Last week, Facebook parent Meta unveiled the AI Sandbox, a "testing playground" for advertisers to try out new generative AI-powered ad tools. The company also announced updates to Meta Advantage, its portfolio of automated tools and products that advertisers can use to enhance their campaigns.

On May 23, Google will be introducing new technologies for advertisers at its annual event, Google Marketing Live. The company hasn't offered specifics about what it will be announcing, but it's made clear that AI will be a central theme.

"You'll discover how our AI-powered ads solutions can help multiply your marketing expertise and drive powerful business results in today's changing economy," the website for the event says.

WATCH: AI takes center stage at Google I/O

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Google plans to use new A.I. models for ads and to help YouTube creators, sources say - CNBC