While a slew of recent generative AI tools have wowed people with their ability to generate human-like output, many users have found over time that they aren’t actually all that beneficial in terms of covering all aspects of manual tasks. You still need to understand what you’re asking these systems to do to ensure information accuracy, and you also need basic process knowledge to maximize their value.
But for many manual tasks, ChatGPT and other tools will be transformative once people fully understand how to incorporate them and integrate them functionally.
And in that respect, this could be a big one.
Today, OpenAI announced updates to ChatGPT-4o’s data analysis capabilities, allowing you to easily input your own spreadsheets and information and let ChatGPT sort it all out for you.
This means you don’t need detailed knowledge of Excel formulas to produce good-looking and valuable data analysis.
In addition to interactive charts and graphs, we are also rolling out the ability to add files directly to ChatGPT from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, which will be available to ChatGPT Plus, Team and Enterprise users in the coming weeks. https://t.co/Fu2bgMChXt pic.twitter.com/M9AHLx5BKr
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) May 16, 2024
As OpenAI explains:
“These improvements are based on ChatGPT’s ability to understand datasets and complete tasks in natural language. First, you upload one or more data files, and ChatGPT will write and run Python code on your behalf to analyze the data. It can handle a variety of data tasks, including merging and cleaning large datasets, building graphs, and discovering insights. This makes it easy for novices to perform in-depth analysis and saves experts time spent on routine data cleaning tasks.”
ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users will be able to upload files from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and use ChatGPT’s conversational interface to refine the dataset and extract relevant insights.
“Once you add a dataset, ChatGPT creates an interactive table that you can expand to a full-screen view so you can see it updating as you analyze. You can click on specific areas to ask follow-up questions or select one of the prompts ChatGPT suggests to take your analysis further.”
This is where modern AI systems provide real value and usefulness, not as a replacement for humans per se, but as assistants for manual tasks that would normally take hours to deploy.
That means that initial data is still required, so data entry and input remains a critical step, but once the information is available, ChatGPT is much better equipped to provide all kinds of analytics and visualizations to streamline the process.
Still, do you need to double-check that the output is correct? Absolutely. Again, these tools are only as valuable as the questions you ask, so you need to know what you’re doing and what you’re trying to find.
But it’s a solid update with a wide range of uses and could prove very useful for social media managers.
Learn more about OpenAI’s latest data analytics updates here.
