DIGI SOCIETY

My experience on digitalization

I remember the day in March 2020, when the COVID-19 made us change from visiting the office daily and having face to face meetings, to 100% remote work. That was biggest digitalization moment on my working career at that moment, setting up a working Teams environment in matter of days and teaching others how to use it properly.

Next big thing was in late 2022 when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched. It was during my previous studies and we were recommended to use it from the beginning. It wasn’t long until I utilized it in my daily work as well and it has helped me significantly since. On the same theme, another big thing was last year (early 2024) when Microsoft Copilot was made available. These two combined have saved so much my time and have allowed me to do more productive tasks. For example, I can get very detailed step by step instructions regarding some applications when I need to do some changes to the settings. Also helps me troubleshooting when some problems occur.

For future work, I guess the next big thing is AI agents that will be taken in to wider use and actually “replacing” real workers or allowing them to do other tasks, that benefit the company much more. I already know that AI is used in recruiting a lot, it saves so much time for recruiters to not have to go through every job application they receive. AI does the initial screening and then interviews are done by real workers. This is just one example how agents can save time.

Already most companies use AI chatbots to handle the first line of customer service, some of them work pretty well, and then there are the ones that repeat the line “Sorry, I don’t understand” even with basic lines.

The GDPR

As a individual person, I think the GDPR laws have given me better control of my data on the internet. I have used multiple times my right to be forgotten on some annoying companies that spam with marketing and phone calls etc. , as well as companies/services I haven’t used in years. To this date, on my cases, I have been forgotten and have not had any problems with companies not complying with the law (as far as I know). This is one of the good things as well as now my data should be handled more securely and not in the way I’m not made aware of.

Then there are the “negative” ones, mainly on working life. When I say negative, I really don’t mean it as a bad thing, but as a little frustrating, time-consuming and costly things.

When I was launching one of my online services, I struggled a little with the GDPR, as I had to write privacy policies to make sure everything was according to the laws and had to use professionals help to make sure they were written right and action plans were made etc. This of course cost quite lot of money for a small “business” and took hours after hours. Of course I understand the need, because as a customer myself, that’s exactly what I want from a company/service.

Previous mentioned case has helped also on my daily working life on my “real” job, as I work a lot with customer data and have good understanding about these things now. I have also noticed that not everybody is aware of these things with in our company and sometimes have to intervene when someone has planned to do something that’s not according to the policies.

Then there is the “right to be forgotten” from company’s point of view. Over the years, I have noticed that some individuals just spam companies with requests to be forgotten even though there are no information on that individual at all. If company has good CRM’s etc. systems, this shouldn’t be big task to review and delete what ever information regarding this individual. However for smaller businesses, this tends to require more effort as these requests have to be acknowledged and handled in any case.

So while the GDPR has good points for customers, it comes with somewhat burden especially for smaller companies.

Chatting with ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT, based on our previous conversations regarding my work, what are some big things to watch in future on my field and how I could benefit myself and my employer with my knowledge. Future things listed were hyperautomation, AI-driven personalization in education and workforce augmentation. I think these were good answers. It also gave me suggestions on what to focus and try to learn and gave solutions for these.

ChatGPT said:

As I mentioned earlier on this post, I have used ChatGPT for a long time and think it is beneficial. I also asked ChatGPT to give statistics based on our history. I created my account 138 weeks ago, few days after ChatGPT was released and I have sent few thousand messages with average message length being little over 300 characters. I’m aware that using these AI’s, it has negative impact on our environment, therefore when I use them, I try to be precise with my prompts and not use them as a search engine like Google.

The answers have got significantly better over the years. I went through some old chats and I had multiple times corrected ChatGPT on the answers. Of course the models have gotten better and better as well. Now it rarely gives me completely wrong answers, but there are still some. This is mostly recognised when given some link and it gathers information from other subpages on that website as well.

Self-reflection

It was interesting to watch the videos in given material, especially when they were mostly 10-13 years old videos. Some of them had good points that we now know have happened and are not just some “futuristic” concepts / ideas. The Corning video (Watch your day in 2020) had some interesting concepts, with unergonomically placed touchscreen in every possible surface etc. Thankfully these ideas have not come part of our everyday life, even though some companies tend to put screens in every single appliances. 

It was also interesting to read other blogs on different fields and how they have used.

 

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