Introduction

It's been just over 12 months since the first edition of The ChatGPT Revolution hit the shelves. In that time, I've seen an explosion of curiosity and enthusiasm about ChatGPT from people everywhere. So many of us want to explore how the power of AI tools like ChatGPT can be used to improve our daily lives.

While writing this second edition, I reflected on how much has changed in such a short time span. We've gone from one simple app that helped with tricky emails to now, when ChatGPT has its own app store where developers can create and sell new GPT tools.

Things certainly have been progressing at pace.

The artificial intelligence landscape has continued to evolve, giving us an almost‐equal mix of new opportunities and challenges. It's increasingly apparent that there is massive potential for ChatGPT and other generative AI applications to revolutionise the way we work and manage our lives.

In this updated edition, I build upon the foundations laid in the first, covering even more practical applications for ChatGPT and exploring the latest advances and trends in AI.

As always, I invite you to approach these pages with an open mind and a willingness to embrace possibility.

AI and related technologies are not going anywhere. In fact, they are becoming more pervasive every week. The future belongs to those who are willing to seize it, and with ChatGPT and this book by your side, you'll be off to a great start.

I write books about productivity because I'm on a mission to give people back time for the most important things in their world. I get ideas for books when I speak with people in organisations about the things that are preventing them from being their best selves or doing their best work.

Hence my books are about things like meetings, structuring your day, and creating space to think and breathe.

So, when my publisher came to me and asked me to write a book about how artificial intelligence (AI) or, more specifically, generative AI applications like ChatGPT, could help us with productivity, I went straight back to the problems that people share with me.

In addition to the three things above, the issues that I regularly hear about (that may be future books) include:

• delegation
• decisions
• email
• information overload
• admin tasks
• life admin.

I'm sure the list goes on and on. This is the stuff that prevents us from doing our ‘real’ work. We would describe it as mundane, tedious and not very value‐adding, particularly if they are tasks we don't do very often. For example, when was the last time you had to:

• write a job description and ad for a role
• write a policy or procedure for a new starter in an organisation
• develop a presentation or proposal from scratch
• handle a client complaint
• plan an event?

All of these infrequent tasks take up a huge amount of time when you only do them on rare occasions, particularly if you are starting from scratch. They are difficult to delegate because (a) you don't do them very often, so (b) it's easier and quicker to just do them yourself.

Generative AI applications like ChatGPT provide us with a tool to get through mundane tasks. A tool to clean our slate of repetitive, uninteresting and demotivating work that must be done. The stuff that prevents us from doing higher value work or keeps us from our families or the things we work for.

Irrespective of where you are in an organisation, you now have a virtual assistant, intern or support person to help you get through these mundane tasks up to 50 per cent faster than you were doing them before.

A study in March 2023 by MIT found that by combining ChatGPT with human input, productivity increased by between 35 and 50 per cent and the quality improved by up to 25 per cent. More recent studies (Cornell University, 2024) uphold those findings that with the help of ChatGPT, participants perform better in terms of stronger results and less time taken to complete tasks.

The question at this point is: Could you use some help to simplify your life and work, and free up more time in your day? If so, read on.

What will you use all this free time for?

For centuries, technological advances from the printing press through to the vacuum cleaner were invented to give us more leisure time. Instead, all it did was give us more time for work.

According to Oliver Burkeman, we are destined to be on the planet for about 4000 weeks. I found this sobering, and it brought into focus my mortality, which begged the further, somewhat less philosophical thought, ‘I'm running out of time, so I'd better use that time wisely.’

Now is the time to leverage technological advancements, like AI and ChatGPT, to make that promise of increased leisure time a reality.

There's been a lot of buzz around ChatGPT and AI, and while you may have heard a thing or two about it, chances are you've picked up this book because you may not understand what it does and how it could be useful to you in taking back some of your valuable time.

This book is about getting beyond the buzz and giving you access to a productivity boon.

Right now, people are already using ChatGPT (or their platform of choice) to generate:

• difficult emails
• process flow charts
• instruction guides
• presentation outlines
• job descriptions
• job applications
• administrative tasks
• summaries and analyses of large amounts of information
• product descriptions
• content, articles and blogs.

And in case you are wondering, yes, some people are using it to help write books (I'll get to that later).

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT represent a significant step forward in the ability of computers to understand and respond to human language. They have the potential to transform the way people interact with technology, providing a more natural and intuitive experience.

But, as with any new technology or time‐saving application, there's always a danger that it could end up creating more work than it saves. Email was supposed to make our lives easier, but it has ended up being a nightmare for a lot of us. I'm reminded of the German word Verschlimmbesserung, which means ‘an intended improvement that makes things worse’.

If used effectively, generative AI has the potential to free up valuable time for other activities, so I think the real question is: What will you do with that time? As technology continues to advance and make tasks easier and more efficient, it is up to us to decide how to use our new‐found free time.

It's important to understand that ChatGPT is only one example of a generative AI platform. Right now, ‘ChatGPT’ is often used like a generic trademark for all things generative AI (think ‘Esky’ and ‘Band‐Aid’, where one brand stands in for all brands!). But despite ChatGPT being the big first mover in this space, writing tools like Jasper AI have been around since February 2021.

Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, new and alternative platforms include:

• Copilot (formerly Bing AI) — developed by OpenAI (the owners of ChatGPT) in partnership with Microsoft
• Google Gemini — initially called Google Bard, and trained on its own language model PaLM 2
• Claude — a next‐generation AI assistant carefully designed to follow ethical principles for avoiding toxic, harmful or discriminatory outputs and illegal activities.

And even ChatGPT has a new free version, called GPT‐4o (omnimodel), which is a vast improvement on previous versions.

Some platforms target specific industries. For example, Jasper AI was developed for those working in marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) and content creation (like blogs or articles). As the industry grows, it's likely that more platforms will be trained on data for increasingly specific uses.

The good news is, whichever platform you choose, the principles in this book will help you to get the most out of it. That's because this book shows you how to interact with any generative AI platform in the most efficient way. You'll learn how to write great prompts and queries that instruct the AI in exactly what you want.

Disclaimer: Before going any further, you need to know that these technologies are moving extremely fast, and they are full of errors. Even while writing this new edition, things were changing, and rumours were rife with what the next versions and new applications would provide. With a technology this explosive, chances are some of the ideas covered in this book could be considered obsolete before it even hits the shelves. Despite this, the fundamentals covered in this book provide core strategies for getting the most out of AI and, more specifically, ChatGPT.

We are still very much in the early stages of adoption, with only 15 per cent of Australians using generative AI to simplify their lives. That means you, right now,...