Enterprise AI vs consumer AI: Why ChatGPT doesn’t work at work
Consumer AI tools don’t have context for the tasks you’re asking them to do at work.
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Glenn Jaume
Product Manager at Coda
AI · 8 min read
What is consumer AI?
Consumer AI is what most people think of when they talk about AI. ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) initially launched in late 2022, is a huge part of the current AI craze, and its large language model has been entertaining thousands. But it’s far from the only consumer AI on the market. Apps like Google Translate, Otter, and Grammarly have been running on AI for years. In short, consumer AI apps are writing, art-generating, or translation machines that scan huge amounts of data and use it to answer questions or respond to prompts, like a sophisticated predictive text machine. Thanks to the patterns consumer AI tools have learned from the data on which they were trained, these apps can serve as a chatbot, writing tool, portrait generator, translator, transcriber, grammar checker, and search engine (but definitely double check its answers; some days ChatGPT hallucinates like a raver). I’ve found consumer AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity useful in some cases and just entertaining in others. ChatGPT especially is creeping into the workplace. I’ve heard of people using it to help optimize schedules and summarize meeting notes. Some people, of course, take it even further, asking the tool to write reports, emails, or code for them. But this is where the main limitation for consumer AI tools shows up: they don’t have context for the tasks you’re asking them to do. Consumer AI tools can’t get much more specific than a general search engine because they don’t have any more context than, well, the entire internet. If you wanted to remember exactly how much vacation time you accrued at your company each month, ChatGPT would be able to give you a general trend in vacation time based on articles about vacation accrual. I asked ChatGPT how much vacation time Coda gets, and…![](https://sanity-images.imgix.net/production/5d5a55b0ec63e107d33d1e1f9367dd0cb48e5099-1668x663.png?w=2000&auto=format%2Ccompress)
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