I found two new ChatGPT features particularly useful and want to share them with you to explore their potential. These features specifically show how Google PE (Product Expert) activity could radically change in the near future - I use the term "change" because I'm obviously optimistic. The first feature, which is truly innovative, is "GPT-4 with scheduled activities." I tested it in a very specific use case that could make us reflect.

ChatGPT with Scheduled Activities

Let's get straight to the point so we can discover how it works and understand what I mean. The idea that came to me, which I immediately submitted as a request to ChatGPT using the scheduled activities model, was:
  • "Every day, read from this site https://support.google.com/s/community/search a question that has no answers, look for this question among those in the Italian Gmail forum, and please prepare the answer for me. When responding, act as if you were a Google Product Expert."
  • After this prompt, ChatGPT created an automated task that will be executed from that moment forward.
  • Now, every day I receive an email like this.
  • By clicking on the "View message" link, I can see the conversation chosen by ChatGPT, and I see the response already prepared, written better than I could write personally, correct and potentially solving the user's problem. All I have to do is click on the link that takes me to the conversation and copy-paste the response. Screenshots of the AI's work follow.

The style used in the responses is excellent and structured with: a small contextualized preface, detailed explanation of the solution, and concluding greetings. What can I say - an excellent automated Product Expert.

What Will Change in PE Activity

It's fair to ask not if everything will change, but when this will happen? Starting from the obvious considerations that we could be replaced blah blah blah, I would immediately take a step forward to understand how a Google Product Expert can undertake a new way to contribute. The project now has hundreds of PEs who diligently help users in all countries around the world. I believe this desire to help is the key that unites us. It's the same drive that pushes me to write this article instead of keeping what I discover to myself. And this key will push us to find new areas in which to act. Let's imagine, for example, and why not, that Google launches something similar to the experiment I did but on a large scale, using Gemini 2.0 obviously. In this case, what I would suggest is to replace PEs for the first response to the user and still leave supervision to PEs, for a second response in case the user isn't satisfied with the first one. A sort of second-level support in case the first automated one fails. Or vice versa, I imagine another scenario where the availability and ingenuity of PEs is used to monitor AI's work, correct it, and train it vertically for this specific task. I make these hypotheses, but only to provide ideas and build a dialogue on a new mode of action. I would very much like to have Google's point of view on this topic. I'm sure they deal with these topics internally daily, and I believe that, as PEs, we have the right to be made aware in advance of any ideas in the proposal. Clearly, it was already evident from the first days when AI showed mastery of our language and logic that many things would change, but now with these new features available, some reasoning becomes even more pressing. Let's remember, as Bill Gates unfortunately said, we tend to overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. I mean that someone might have thought that, more than a year after AI's release, nothing has changed yet and therefore maybe we're not facing that revolutionary discovery we suspected it to be. In reality, even though our life is proceeding similarly to before, there are many indications of changes coming, and I'm not just referring to PE activity.

Screen Share

In any case, I would like to move on to the second novelty I wanted to share, which concerns the "Share Screen" functionality. With these features, AI begins to view your smartphone screen in real-time along with you, listens to you, allowing you to interact. For example, I activated this feature and then asked ChatGPT to guide me through the Google Home app to enable calendar access to the voice assistant (a small task that I didn't know how to do at that moment). The AI, seeing what I saw, guided me through the menus to the solution. I found this function still quite raw, it gets some things wrong, but certainly sensational. I believe this function should also be viewed in perspective - any smartphone in the future could have an automatic "AI help" inside that guides the user to the solution.

Concluding

I conclude with another small idea that came to me thinking about an evolution of PE activity. In my reasoning, I started from the assumption that writing activities will be the first to be replaced, while activities requiring empathy and physical presence will remain untouched. We could therefore think of welcoming users on the forum who want to deepen their use of Google products, not just those trying to solve problems. We could then organize web calls or live meetings at various levels. In these meetings, users and PEs could share their usage experiences, leading the group to grow and get to know each other. That is, the Google Product Expert will focus on increasing adoption rather than problem-solving. I know from experience how much teaching specific topics makes everyone grow tremendously because each person who participates always brings their contribution. This embryonic idea is just another hint of reasoning, like the embryo of a project to reason about the details, or to draw inspiration from for another reasoning. If I wanted the maximum from a future PE project, I would like to imagine that one could simply participate in Summits around the world, meet other PEs, and return each time with a technological gadget to show friends to spread its use. If AI really does many things instead of us, at least let's think about keeping the most fun ones. Massimiliano