When a revolutionary new technology or service emerges, there is always a knee-jerk reaction. Understandably, when livelihoods are threatened people tend to build walls around their existing way of life and work. This is typically followed by calls for a technology, or a resulting service, to be banned. To some extent we’ve seen this with the likes of Uber and Airbnb. But these technologies and services emerge for a reason and that is usually because they tend to be useful.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, for the moment at least, is no different. Although leading thinkers and tech observers such as Yuval Noah Harari suggest “we have summoned an alien intelligence,” in engineering and manufacturing, ChatGPT has already stirred-up considerable interest. Far from being a job killer, it is already being seen as a useful tool in analyzing and translating data and in saving time on generating text responses to complex engineering questions.

Of course, there are caveats. As we’ve already outlined previously on engineering.com, ChatGPT is not immune from what it calls “hallucinations,” or in other words, errors. Also, ChatGPT currently only works on data up to 2021. That should shape the thinking in how to use the technology. As Amit Jain, chief product officer at ServiceMax says, “it [ChatGPT] shouldn’t have the final word.” It’s far from foolproof and yet, that has not been enough to dampen enthusiasm.

“Engineers and manufacturers are finding ChatGPT to be a powerful tool for a wide range of applications,” says Angelo Sorbello, founder of Linkdelta.com, a generative AI platform. “One major advantage is its ability to quickly generate text responding to complex and technical questions. This can save engineers and manufacturers significant time and effort in researching technical issues.”

Sorbello adds that ChatGPT can also help with writing technical documentation, generating product descriptions and even automating customer service responses. This is perhaps more likely, at least in its current iteration. Of course, ChatGPT 4, the new and much more powerful version of the technology, has an ability to go much further. As Jain from ServiceMax points out, its ability to process and analyze unstructured data makes it an interesting proposition, especially for manufacturers and machine service engineers.

“ChatGPT can do much more of the drudge work for engineers,” says Jain. “It is incredibly good at consuming unstructured data and generating content. This has huge scope for field service.”

The language comprehension in ChatGPT means engineers can jot down a few notes as part of their debrief and the AI can use the content to generate a report, for example, adds Jain. This means engineers can automate the mundane work, such as writing and summarizing what they’ve just done when they complete a job, and generate a report quickly and easily.

“For service engineers, any practical tool that saves them time means they’ll use it,” says Jain. “Depending on how well ChatGPT delivers on its promise, such content generation could eventually be used for customer facing content, as well as educational, upselling and personalized cross selling content.”

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