How Genesis staff are trying AI within

• Published date: 25 April 2024
• Author: Chris Keall
• Publication title: Bay of Plenty Times

“We just cut it off. We had to look at it through a risk-based lens. It just came out of the blue,” says Genesis future energy general manager Steph Creasy

But she also saw that as a temporary response.

“We couldn’t just ban it. We’d miss the opportunity to leverage the technology. When Microsoft offered us the opportunity to join the Copilot early access programme, we saw our chance to explore what generative AI could do, while safely managing the risk,” Creasy says.

After investing north of US$10 billion ($16.8b), Microsoft is now ChatGPT maker Open AI’s largest backer — and its Copilot AI piggybacks on ChatGPT’s smarts.

The free version of Copilot can be used for the likes of summarising a document or website or creating an image.

A pro version, which costs $37 per user per month, will work with Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams.

And, crucially, it offers commercial data protection. While it can be useful to, say, ask a generative AI to help edit the draft of your 10-page presentation to five slides, your data can also go into the public mix, or be used for AI training.

With its Pro product, Microsoft says: “User and business data in Copilot is protected and will not leak outside the organisation. Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access to it. Chat data is also not used to train our underlying models.”

You also get priority access to Chat GPT 4 (the version fed with up-to-date data) during busy times.

Months before Copilot’s official release, in November last year, Genesis became one of the first five organisations in New Zealand — and one of only a handful in the world — to trial the product. Genesis did not get it for free as a pilot customer, but did get priority support and other perks, Creasy says.

An hour a week in time savings

An initial, limited trial involved around 30 Genesis staff. “We wanted to flush out any challenges or ethical risks,” Creasy says. It’s now been expanded to some 300 employees (of a total complement of about 1300).

Creasy says 70 per cent of staff on the pilot are saving at least one hour a week from using Copilot, while some power users are shaving off up to five hours.

Genesis has also created three in-house AI tools, one for...