All summer long, we interview employees, freelancers, and business leaders about their relationship with generative artificial intelligence. How do they use it, how do it change their professional practices? Today, Guillaume de Sorbay, head of a craft business.
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Guillaume de Sorbay is 36 years old and defines himself as “son and grandson of building contractors”. After starting his career as a salesman in aeronautics, he wanted to become his own boss. At the beginning of 2020, he bought two small and medium-sized businesses, including Simmad, which makes custom staircases in Eslettes in Normandy. He employs 49 people. A little over a year ago, when he heard about generative artificial intelligence, it left him perplexed:
“My relationship with AI, at first, was like that of a chicken with a razor blade: it shines, it looks interesting, but we don’t really know what it is and we don’t know if we should touch it. Along with other Norman business leaders, he decided to explore the subject further.
“We identified a specialist, who came to discuss the subject with us, to explain to us what artificial intelligence is, what generative artificial intelligence is, how many there are, what are the areas of application and how it works through demonstrations.”
William of SorbayOwner of the Simmad craft business
“We started playing with it, continues Guillaume de Sorbay, and it was very interesting to see both the motivations and the apprehensions of the different business leaders, with on one side those who feel threatened, for example the communications companies, whose job is to create websites, logos, brochures, and on the other, the industrial companies who have perceived generative AI as a giant calculator, which can save time.”
After an experimental phase, he has been using generative AI for four months to produce almost all of his external communication. In text and images. He mentions two types of gains.
“The first is a time saving. The company’s communications manager spends much, much less time writing the articles that she will then publish on social networks.
Then, we refreshed our website, which requires creating content to present our businesses, etc. Content writing, which is generally billed by a communications agency at between 200 and 300 euros per page, is now something that we have chatGPT write in a few seconds, with a subscription of around twenty euros per month.”
Beyond communication, the SME uses generative AI to write legal letters, service notes, job descriptions or to sort CVs. Finally, when it comes to confidential data, Guillaume de Sorbay is particularly attentive. “If I ask ChatGPT to work on the analysis of the coherence of my salary policy, we are not in a confessional. If you ask ChatGPT a question on Monday, you have an answer. But if your competitor, who is in the next town, asks him the same question the next day, there is a non-zero probability that his answer, 24 hours after you, will be enriched by the information you gave him the day before.”
For security reasons, only three Simmad employees were trained and have the right to work with generative artificial intelligence. Today, Guillaume de Sorbay’s main concern with these new technological tools is that they short-circuit learning.
“If tomorrow, a young person at the very beginning of their career gets into the habit of exclusively using AI to analyze the information they are given, this person will not develop expertise in analysis, since they will subordinate this action to a machine.”