What’s the biggest impact ChatGPT has made on business over the past two years?
Part I of our two year anniversary review of ChatGPT's impact
We asked AI experts to share their take on how ChatGPT has altered the business landscape since it arrived in November 2022 release. They highlighted how it has democratized AI access and is boosting productivity for organizations, executives, and individual contributors alike.
While ChatGPT offers opportunities and challenges by shifting views on human capital—raising questions about task automation and even role replacement—many professionals face a dilemma about embracing AI tools or risking their career relevance. Experts note a surge in innovation and startups fueled by AI’s hype, yet some caution that the true transformative impact may still lie ahead, and there have already been missteps and flawed investments among both startups and established companies.
Following is each expert’s full answer. You can see all three parts, including Next Steps (the present) and A Look Ahead (the future).
CX Strategist & Enterprise AI Executive
I think the immediate impact to date from ChatGPT is primarily 2 areas. First, the advent of ChatGPT has essentially become the driving force for how Google has been redeploying ever since the LLM went public. In addition to fast-tracking Gemini, Google is racing to reinvent its role in the future as more people shift to LLM based interactions over traditional search. Without ChatGPT, Google would have largely stayed the course it was on prior to the LLM revolution.
And second, ChatGPT has made a huge impact in the small business world including startups where enterprise-grade data security is less of an issue. The API combined with the CustomGPT ecosystem is allowing for startups to launch with MVPs in record time.
Chief Marketing Officer, Knownwell
The actual impact to date has come via the execution layer of business. Across a large swath of business, there have been productivity gains on an individual level. In addition, businesses have had to think about humanity in a way that is unlike what we’ve had in modern business—what makes us different than machines, what are the things we want to keep, how do we utilize AI to elevate humanity rather than destroy it.
Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group
ChatGPT revolutionized the AI landscape by making AI accessible to anyone with internet access via a simple browser interface, significantly boosting awareness of OpenAI. This move led to heightened user expectations and posed substantial risks to established tech leaders. Prior to ChatGPT, AI was primarily accessible through data scientists and tech professionals. Established companies had been harnessing AI’s capabilities correctly through stages like Analytical AI, Predictive AI, and eventually, Generative AI. However, many businesses prematurely attempted to leap directly into Generative AI without success. Successful companies, on the other hand, took a more measured approach by analyzing their current issues and integrating AI into existing systems or adopting specialized AI solutions. Meanwhile, several rivals of OpenAI and ChatGPT are emerging, gaining traction, and could potentially dominate the enterprise and business AI sectors.
Founder, AI Marketers Guild
ChatGPT has empowered a new era of creativity. We’re no more creative than we were two years ago, but now we have more tools to bring ideas to life, from creating mind-blowing visuals to having conversations with our data.
Publisher, AI Marketing Ethics Digest
Reflecting on the past two years, ChatGPT’s most notable influence on business may be democratizing access to powerful artificial intelligence. ChatGPT has opened creative, operational, and strategic opportunities across sectors by offering readily available, user-friendly AI tools. These tools enable even small businesses and individuals to employ artificial intelligence without a professional tech team. However, this accessibility comes with a price—the need to use these tools responsibly and ethically—a discourse that badly needs to occur in 2025.
Product Strategist, Hubbl Technologies
Author, The Data Mindset Playbook
First of all, it’s made me quite lazy… because I immediately asked ChatGPT for an answer. and by God it was a dull response. So, here’s what I think… not only has it STARTED to make us all lazier, it has created an unbelievable amount of hype and with that comes revenue for ‘consultants’ who have decided that this is a great way to generate money by selling snake oil. Organizations are FOMO’ing at the mouth to start building GenAI … GenAI what? That’s the point, just building Gen AI period.
If you rip off the front of the virtual building, you see a lot of individuals using the free accounts to make their jobs easier – just getting ChatGPT to write initial drafts or copywrite from seed ideas. More sophisticated uses are where people that don’t code are now able to generate code and deploy it, whether its automation for their Google Sheets or MS Excel or to write whole applications that they can deploy on the web. In short it has removed a barrier to doing things by substituting technical instruction for just replacing the human. Nothing that we’ve not done before as a species… but this is so powerful that it might leave us in danger of becoming more stupid. Will we be living out the movie Idiocracy within a generation?
Right now, we are at maximum hype… or according to Gartner, we’ve tipped over. But the last 2 years has been a lot of hype – tech media frenzy, lots of startup overvaluation, lots of strategic consulting expenditures. Is there anything to show for it? Experience, mistakes, prototypes, learning, excitement.
Founder/COO, EyeLevel.AI
In a weird way it hasn’t had much impact on the business world yet. But people probably forget how long the path was from the birth of the web in ’92 to major disruption other than a stock market rush and crash. Google was formed in 98 and Facebook in 2004. Netflix started in 97 and didn’t start streaming until 10 years later. Apple, the biggest winner of them all, almost went belly up in the 90s.
Basically, the FANG that we consider the kings of the Internet age either didn’t exist or were on death row in the first few years after Marc Andreessen made the Mosaic browser and the modern web was born. Tech revolutions, like war, tend to be hurry up and wait.
Chief Strategy Officer, CognitivePath
ChatGPT was the catalyst to turn the long-simmering AI wave into a full boil that enveloped the business world. While there was a lot of what if type of speculation about potential applications that were not realized (yet), ChatGPT provided concrete validation that AI can generate useful text in a variety of ways. Further, the trainable GPT algorithm demonstrated that generative AI can be applied to a variety of outcomes and purposes. Still in the end, within the context of an all-powerful AI, ChatGPT underwhelmed most professionals when applied to complex tasks.
Chief Operating Officer, Astral.AI
The biggest impact has undoubtedly been in how we think about people resourcing. Even if adoption has only really picked up over the past 6-8 months, and true operationalization is only getting started, the jobs sector is haunted by the specter of ‘AI is coming for my job.’
Founder & Editorial Director, human
The most profound impact has been on the accessibility of knowledge and the democratization of creativity. ChatGPT has enabled companies to harness the power of language and data in ways that were previously limited to specialized teams or external experts. But it has also raised fundamental questions about the relationship between human and machine intelligence in the workplace – challenging organizations to rethink and redefine the role of human ingenuity, intellect, and judgment.
Chief Operating Officer, CognitivePath
ChatGPT tipped AI into the mainstream, making it accessible to companies of all sizes, accelerating productivity, and opening new avenues for engagement. But it’s not an unqualified win. When used as just a shortcut to efficiency, we risk trading genuine human insight for convenience. Customer experiences can feel more transactional than relational. And ethical issues abound. ChatGPT’s real value lies in amplifying human expertise and experience, not recycling it, replacing it, and reducing it to some ‘raw average.’ The question now is, how do we ensure widespread use of a technology like generative AI elevates our work without sacrificing what makes it uniquely ours?