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In the short time since it launched in November 2022, ChatGPT’s popularity has exploded. The large language model-based chatbot from developer OpenAI has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history to date.
With such a widescale adoption of AI came a cascading impact every facet of business—including the office of finance.
“I think the biggest change AI will bring is the ability to augment the office of finance to do more with less, just like CPM (corporate performance management) has done the last decade-plus,” said Dominic DiBernardo, Partner and CPM Practice Leader for Citrin Cooperman. “I certainly don’t think it replaces finance people, just makes them more valuable. They will continue to be able to help the company get deeper insights that are actionable.”
In this article, will delve into several statistics that illustrate the scale and impact of ChatGPT and explore use cases for the tool within finance teams, along with sample prompts and guidelines for mitigating risk.
1. ChatGPT surpassed 100 million active users in less than two months.1
2. ChatGPT received 1.6 billion visits across desktop and mobile devices in June 2023.1
3. ChatGPT has an average site visit duration 8.2 times higher than the web-wide average of 54 seconds.2
4. OpenAI’s computing costs to run ChatGPT are estimated to be $100k daily and $3M monthly.3
5. AI models like ChatGPT may consume all available data for training and run out of new data as soon as 2026.4
As of January 2024, estimates show that ChatGPT has over 180.5 million users, but the adoption rate of ChatGPT is hotly contested. Its number of users has steadily declined in recent months, almost 8% from November to December 2023.
Adoption of ChatGPT also skews younger—fewer than 19% of 30-to-44-year-olds use ChatGPT themselves—and the rate is even lower for other adults.
ChatGPT’s user count cements it as the fastest-growing consumer app in history, reaching the milestone just two months after it launched. So how many people are actually using ChatGPT?
6. Over 13 million unique daily users visit ChatGPT.5
7. ChatGPT exceeded 1.8 billion visits in both April and May 2023, its highest monthly totals yet.1
8. ChatGPT’s count of 1.6 billion visits in December 2023 dropped 7.83% from the previous month- indicative of a steady decline in users decrease in users over the last several months.1
9. The average weekly user count was 100 million users as of November 2023.1
10. The largest growth spurt of ChatGPT’s user count was between February and March 2023, when the bot’s user count grew by approximately 560 million users.1
Now that you know how many people are using ChatGPT, let’s take a look at exactly who those users are.
ChatGPT access is available in most countries, but not all. Some countries have even banned access to the tool. Among countries with ChatGPT access, usage varies widely, and there are top users around the globe in different hemispheres.
11. ChatGPT API access is currently supported in 188 countries.7
12. At least 15 countries have an outright ban on ChatGPT currently, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Cuba.9
13. Italy initially banned ChatGPT for privacy concerns, but access was reinstated in April 2023. Other European countries have also considered a ban.10
14. The top five ChatGPT-using countries make up around one-third (31.02%) of all users.1
15. In December 2023, the U.S. had the largest share of ChatGPT users globally at 14.14%.1
16. India had the second-most ChatGPT users globally in December 2023, at 7.63% of traffic.1
17. The Philippines (3.37%), Japan (3.23%), and Canada (2.65%) were the third, fourth, and fifth biggest global ChatGPT users, respectively.1
Users of ChatGPT span all age groups, but are most concentrated between Generation Z and Millennials.
With the youngest and most populous demographic in the workforce adopting AI tools at increasingly higher rates, companies will need to contend with their employees’ increased desire for AI.
18. Out of 466 people surveyed who are at least remotely familiar with ChatGPT, 18-to-29-year-olds were three times more likely to use the tool to generate text than those in the 65+ age group (15% vs. 5%, respectively).11
19. Among 1,000 U.S. adults who participated in a January 2023 survey, 9% of those aged 18-29 admitted to using AI tools “very often.” This is around twice as much as those who used the tools “very often” in the 45-64 group (4%) and the 65+ group (5%).11
20. Just 6% of all ages use the tools “very often.” 11
21. Nearly half (44%) of those aged 65+ surveyed in January 2023 said they never used AI tools like ChatGPT. 19% weren’t sure if they had or not.11
As ChatGPT continues to evolve, people will continue to discover new ways to use the tool. The company behind the chatbot, too, will likely develop revised iterations and novel features that continue to change how we all think about our day-to-day work.
For instance, the code interpreter plugin OpenAI announced in July 2023 allows the tool to conduct data analysis and create visualizations based on a data set that you provide.
Here’s how people currently use ChatGPT.
22. The average visit duration for ChatGPT users in December 2023 was 7 minutes and 33 seconds.1
23. ChatGPT has 12 initial plugins: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier. There are more than 940 total third-party plugins available.12
24. Approximately 89% of ChatGPT traffic is direct, 9% comes organic search, and less than 1% comes from site referrals (mostly social media).1
25. Organic keywords drive 99.98% of ChatGPT’s total monthly traffic figures. Paid traffic is only 0.02%.1
26. Among social media sites, YouTube drives the most traffic to ChatGPT, with around a 64% share.1
27. YouTube drives more social media traffic to ChatGPT than all other referral channels combined.1
With the bulk of social media traffic to ChatGPT coming predominantly from YouTube, it’s likely that people are consuming content that teaches them use cases and skills with ChatGPT, taking learning into their own hands.
“From a finance perspective, one of the things that’s cumbersome [...] is simply responding to questions about financial positions and responding to questions about the current status of a forecast—just questions about how financial data comes together,” said Vena’s CTO Hugh Cumming during a keynote at Excelerate Summit 2023.
“This is one of the use cases that we see will come quickly with the assistance of technologies like ChatGPT, which is simply the ability to respond to stakeholders.”
With ChatGPT, you can give it a data set and ask it questions about that data to quickly discover trends and new patterns. You can even have ChatGPT instantaneously create data models through the code interpreter plugin.
This is a dream come true for any finance professional still dealing with financial reporting.
There are many ways finance professionals can leverage ChatGPT. For example, you might ask it to analyze a particular dataset and provide you with a summary of the data. You might also ask it to simplify a sales forecast into digestible language that you can present to leadership.
But for ChatGPT answers to be as tailored to your needs as possible, you should keep a few considerations in mind:
Let’s look at some ways finance teams can use ChatGPT to level up their work game.
ChatGPT can help finance professionals move faster in Excel, the method of strategic analysis most commonly used by finance teams—even amid the growing list of technologies available today.
Research from Dresner Advisory Services found that 56% of organizations are still using spreadsheets as a company-sanctioned strategic tool for analysis. Another 41% saw them more as a necessary evil—but still used them.
ChatGPT can:
To use ChatGPT to create Excel spreadsheets, you’ll need to feed it a dataset and give it a clear set of instructions. For Excel formulas, you won’t need as much instruction, but you’ll need a clear idea of what you’d like the result to look like, such as in the prompt below.
Pouring over spreadsheets can be enlightening but also draining.
Tasking ChatGPT with data analysis can help speed up the time it takes finance teams to generate insights. Of course, ChatGPT isn’t a complete replacement for any FP&A software, but a compliment to finance teams by allowing AI to extract value from their data faster.
You can also use ChatGPT for routine tasks like answering questions that might come from senior leadership, like explaining the trends and implications from the previous quarter’s sales.
One of the most important roles a finance team has is business partnering—surfacing the data generated within finance to other teams to inform decision making.
But communicating the meaning of that data to a non finance audience can be challenging, especially when you’re so close to the data.
Because ChatGPT can mimic specific individuals’ style of speech, one potentially time-saving use case for finance teams is to ask it to tailor your message to your target audience for you.
For example, you can instruct it to structure results for certain audiences, like sales or marketing teams, or any relevant party outside of your finance team.
like ChatGPT into every facet of your business. But, finance professionals should be cautious about adopting any new technology without thoroughly understanding the risks.
Natural language processing technology like that used in ChatGPT is continually drawing on data to train itself and improve its output. The risk of sharing your business data creates the possibility for any sensitive, confidential or proprietary data to become accessible or searchable to others, including competitors. All ChatGPT conversations are stored on OpenAI’s servers and used to train future iterations of the bot unless you specifically opt out.
Like many apps, ChatGPT is vulnerable to bugs, meaning any sensitive data you provide to the tool could be at risk in the event of a leak. In May 2023, Samsung banned employee access to ChatGPT after an engineer unknowingly leaked sensitive internal source code when they used it in a conversation with the chatbot.
If you or anyone on your finance team intends on using ChatGPT to speed up tedious tasks, ensure you’re following these best practices:
ChatGPT is as good an indicator as any that the world is changing fast.
As more companies start to use AI tools like it in their day-to-day operations, early adopters will gain a competitive advantage over those slow to adopt, developing the policies and employee skills necessary to unlock the full potential of this technology.
“Implementing AI technologies often necessitates organizational and cultural changes,” said Harjot Ghai, Chief Operating Officer at Delbridge Solutions. “Some CFOs may be wary of the disruption and resistance that can accompany these changes. Overcoming this hurdle requires effective change management strategies, including clear communication, training and involvement of key stakeholders throughout the AI adoption process.”
Beyond ChatGPT, there are already AI-powered tools available to finance professionals that enable them to delve deeper into their data.
Vena Insights, for instance, uses Microsoft’s best-in-class AI and machine learning technology from PowerBI to help you get answers to complex business questions faster.
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