News

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google Usher the Age of Enterprise AI

• By David Ramel
• 08/29/2023

The age of enterprise AI is advancing with new offerings from OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, three of the leaders in advanced, generative systems that are reshaping the IT industry.

Yesterday, Aug. 28, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Enterprise, while Microsoft introduced Bing Chat Enterprise in the Windows Copilot Preview. And Google today announced a flurry of enterprise AI-related news items at its Google Cloud Next '23 conference.

Microsoft and OpenAI are closely intertwined with Microsoft's $10 billion-plus investment in OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI craze late last year with ChatGPT, the machine learning large language model (LLM) whose tech Microsoft quickly infused throughout its products and services under the Copilot moniker. Google was seemingly caught off-guard, declared a "code red" to catch up and has been making moves of its own.

ChatGPT Enterprise
For ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI is following the familiar model of taking a product from free preview usage by all (to help improve it) to pay-for by adding on perks like enterprise-grade security, privacy, scaled deployment and so on. The new Enterprise plan with a price of "contact sales" joins the $20-per-month Plus plan and the Free plan, adding enhanced tech and functionality along with the enterprise support.

The enhanced tech starts with OpenAI's most advanced LLM, GPT-4, with OpenAI listing its benefits as:

• Unlimited access to GPT-4 (no usage caps)
• Higher-speed performance for GPT-4 (up to 2x faster)
• Unlimited access to advanced data analysis (formerly known as Code Interpreter)
• 32k token context windows for 4x longer inputs, files or follow-ups
• Shareable chat templates for a company to collaborate and build common workflows
• Free credits to use OpenAI's APIs if needed to extend OpenAI into a fully custom solution for an organization

In the enterprise-grade security/privacy department, the company said:

• Customer prompts and company data are not used for training OpenAI models.
• Data encryption at rest (AES 256) and in transit (TLS 1.2+)
• Certified SOC 2 compliant (concerning the handling of customer data)

Finally, the scaled deployment involves:

• Admin console with bulk member management
• SSO
• Domain verification
• Analytics dashboard for usage insights

Going forward, plans call for:

• Customization: Securely extend ChatGPT's knowledge with company data by connecting the applications already used
• Availability for all team sizes: a self-serve ChatGPT Business offering for smaller teams
• Power tools: Even more powerful versions of Advanced Data Analysis and browsing that are optimized for work
• Solutions for your function: more tools for specific roles, such as data analysts, marketers, customer support and more

"Since ChatGPT's launch just nine months ago, we've seen teams adopt it in over 80% of Fortune 500 companies," OpenAI said in a post yesterday. We've heard from business leaders that they'd like a simple and safe way of deploying it in their organization. Early users of ChatGPT Enterprise -- industry leaders like Block, Canva, Carlyle, The Estée Lauder Companies, PwC, and Zapier -- are redefining how they operate and are using ChatGPT to craft clearer communications, accelerate coding tasks, rapidly explore answers to complex business questions, assist with creative work, and much more."

Bing Chat Enterprise in the Windows Copilot Preview
Bing Chat Enterprise debuted in July (see the article, "Bing Chat Enterprise Debuts: 'More than 160 Million People Already Have Access'"). It builds on the "new Bing" AI-powered search experience with commercial data protection that ensures enterprise data is protected and not leaked outside an organization. Use cases range from understanding the implications of a business decision to writing better code to generating social media content.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced an expansion of the program.

"Starting today, we are beginning to roll out Bing Chat Enterprise in the Windows Copilot Preview for eligible commercial customers (learn more about Bing Chat Enterprise licensing) in the Dev Channel," Microsoft said. "Some eligible commercial customers in the Beta Channel may also see it as well. Enterprises who have Bing Chat Enterprise enabled on Bing.com will not need to perform any extra steps to enable it in the Windows Copilot Preview."

Microsoft said the enterprise offering being accessed from the Windows Copilot Preview won't change things much for enterprise employees or IT departments.

"For your employees, the experience will be very similar to the existing experience with Bing Chat -- the branding changes to reflect Bing Chat Enterprise, and there is a reminder with each prompt that personal and corporate data is protected," the company said.

"For IT Pros and those responsible for data protection and compliance the changes are 'under the hood.' Bing Chat Enterprise enables your organization to use Windows Copilot with confidence that your data is protected -- chat data is not saved, Microsoft has no 'eyes on' access, and your data is not used to train the underlying models."

Microsoft earlier listed several use cases for the service:

• Understand the implications of a decision: "What are the pros and cons of offline marketing strategies?" and "How can I measure the success of my offline marketing campaign?"
• Learn new skills: "What are the top 5 things I should know when managing a large project?" and "What is agile project management and how does it differ from waterfall?"
• Analyze data: "If we're forecasting 7 percent EPS growth this coming quarter, how does our internal forecast compare with EPS growth in the top US public CPG companies?"
• Summarize a work PDF open in Edge: "Recap the findings of this internal cybersecurity report and the top 3 concerns" and "What are best practices for addressing these kinds of security issues?"
• Write better code faster: "Write a regular expression in Python that matches email addresses" or "How can I use the unittest module to write test units for my Python code."
• Plan a business trip: "Where should I stay in Manhattan that has a good running path close by?"
• Generate social media content: "Use this messaging framework to generate 5 social media posts describing its value to healthcare workers."

Google Cloud Next '23
This conference kicked off today, Aug. 29, the day after the Microsoft and OpenAI announcements, with a heavy emphasis on AI and the enterprise being trumpeted in an opening-day introductory blog post. Enterprise AI was discussed in the context of several offerings, including Vertex AI, the company's managed machine learning platform that helps developers and data scientists build, deploy and manage machine learning models at scale.

"Vertex AI Search and Conversation are now generally available, enabling organizations to create Search and Chat applications using their data in just minutes, with minimal coding and enterprise-grade management and security built in," the company said.

"In addition, Vertex AI Generative AI Studio provides user-friendly tools to tune and customize models, all with enterprise-grade controls for data security. These include developer tools like Text Embeddings API, which lets developers build sophisticated applications based on semantic understanding of text or images, and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which incorporates human feedback to deeply customize and improve model performance."

More details were provided in another Aug. 29 post, where new models and tooling were unveiled. Google said they expand Vertex AI's capabilities and further empower customers to easily experiment and build with foundation models, customize them with enterprise data and integrate and deploy them into applications with built-in privacy, safety features and responsible AI:

• New models in Model Garden to further our customer commitment to providing choice with a diverse and open ecosystem. New additions include Llama 2 and Code Llama from Meta along with the Technology Innovation Institute's Falcon LLM, and we're pre-announcing Anthropic's Claude 2.These announcements give Google Cloud a curated collection of models across, first-party, open source, and third-party models.
• Updates to several of our first-party foundation models, bringing the deep expertise of Google DeepMind to our customers. This includes upgrades to PaLM with higher quality outputs, a 32,000-token context window that makes analysis of much larger documents simple, and grounding capabilities for enterprise data. Codey, our model for code generation and chat, now offers better performance, and Imagen, our model for image generation, features improved image quality.
• A new digital watermarking functionality for Imagen powered by Google DeepMind's SynthID.
• New tools to help enterprises get more value out of our models. This includes Vertex AI Extensions, which enable models to retrieve real-time data and take real-world actions, and Vertex AI data connectors, which offer data ingestion and read only access across various sources.

Along with the Vertex enhancements, Google announced improvements to its AI-optimized infrastructure, including TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) processors. The company expanded its AI-optimized infrastructure portfolio with a preview of Cloud TPU v5e, described as its most cost-efficient, versatile and scalable Cloud TPU to date. Google also said its A3 virtual machines (VMs), based on NVIDIA H100 GPUs and delivered as a GPU Supercomputer, will be generally available next month to power large-scale AI models.

Several other announcements were also made about enterprise AI, including improvements to its Duet AI for Google Workspace, an AI-powered virtual assistant designed to help users manage their work and personal lives. Two items of note include:

• Duet AI in Google Meet: Duet AI will take notes during video calls, send meeting summaries, and even automatically translate captions in 18 languages. In addition, to ensure every meeting participant is clearly seen, heard, and understood, Duet AI in Meet announced studio look, studio lighting, and studio sound.
• Duet AI in Google Chat: Users can chat directly with Duet AI to ask questions about content, get a summary of documents shared in a space, and catch up on missed conversations. Google also delivered a refreshed UI, new shortcuts, and enhanced search to help stay on top of conversations, as well as huddles in Chat which allow teams to start meetings from the place where they are already collaborating.

More to Come
With enterprise AI moves being made by three of the industry standouts -- following many similar developments taken by companies like IBM and NVIDIA -- there is no doubt the pace of enterprise AI has accelerated. Stay tuned for more news from major players, including fellow cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS).