The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday, July 6, edition that earlier this year, Mark Austin, the vice-president of data science at AT&T, noticed that some of the company's developers had started using the ChatGPT chatbot at work. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe reports that when the developers got stuck, they asked ChatGPT to explain, fix or hone their code. It seemed to be a game-changer, Mr. Austin said. However, since ChatGPT is a publicly available tool, he wondered if it was secure for businesses to use. So in January, AT&T tried a product from Microsoft called Azure OpenAI Services that lets businesses build their own artificial-intelligence-powered chatbots. AT&T used it to create a proprietary AI assistant, Ask AT&T, which helps its developers automate their coding process. AT&T's customer service representatives also began using the chatbot to help summarize their calls, among other tasks. Mr. Austin said developers who used the chatbot increased their productivity by 20 per cent to 50 per cent. Over the past three months, Amazon, Box and Cisco have unveiled plans for generative AI-powered products that produce code, analyze documents and summarize meetings.