UGC and the Creator Economy

What do you think the "C" stands for??

So the holidays came early for nerds, geeks, and people like me who love the movie Hackers (Hack the Planet!). I’m talking about the first-ever dev conference for OpenAI and its child ChatGPT. If you missed all the news, the big piece of the day I want to touch on is the launch of what OpenAI is calling “GPTs.” Basically you’ll be able to create something close to a custom “agent.” Think about it like creating a custom personality to overlay your interactions with ChatGPT.

Casey Newton over at Platformer has a great breakdown here but this screenshot should give you an idea how easy it will be to create these custom interactions:

There’s no code involved there and he just created a copy editor. This one is so simple it didn’t even use the API now available from OpenAI to link to outside services.

I know what you’re thinking - where is the creator economy in all this? Well if you thought that the creator economy just referred to TikToks and Insta Reels maybe some Twitch streamers and YouTubers, then I don’t think you’re going big enough. What if the “C” in UGC (user generated content), actually stands for “code”?

We were already seeing the growth of “no code” platforms like Softr, Bubble, Glide, Draftbit, Zapier Interfaces, Bildr, Backendless, and FlutterFlow that allow for the creation of apps with literally no coding. I was already going to write about that when the OpenAI news hit. Now stick with me - I used to work at Amazon, a place with no shortage of devs. I learned quickly that if devs can’t find a tool or service that does a particular thing they need, they’re as likely as not to create it on their own. That’s cool for that team but can have second order affects - like others teams also using that tool and then the original dev quits or gets promoted or moves to another team and that tool is now an orphan - but one that people rely on. What then? OpenAI just kicked that up a notch.

Now its not just that you don’t have to know code, you don’t even have to learn how to use those individual platforms. You just have to learn how to talk to ChatGPT and tell it what you want and what service to connect to and off it goes. Ever need custom reports from your LMS? Write an agent that either connects to your LMS directly or let’s say that your LMS sends its data over to Tableau and you just tell your own personal GPT to connect to that and bring you the report you need. Assessments? Write an agent that will connect to an appropriate library of assessments and in conversational language, tell it to build your assessments. Need a course created? How about an ISD Agent connected to a text to video generator, a content library and that has upload permissions to your LMS? OK, let’s forget the L&D department for a minute; what if you’re a user?

You need to stay up to date on certain information - maybe its regulatory, maybe its pricing, maybe its voice of the customer input? With zero help from L&D, you write an agent to hunt down that info and tell it the most useful format to bring it to you. Or you’re an exec and you want to test your team’s readiness for an upcoming launch - all on your own and in a few minutes, you create a short course, maybe a video with a virtual avatar that looks like you and you add in a short quiz at the end and then you send it out to your team. All of this is done with no code. Now it gets interesting.

Imagine all of this happening across the enterprise. Hundreds or thousands of employees creating no code apps and services. If we leave aside for a minute the poor CIO who is having difficulty breathing right now, lets think about our internal economies. Kat Norton is better know as Miss Excel. She has about a million followers on TikTok, about 900K followers on Instagram, and literally is making millions of dollars a year teaching Excel in little pieces. Now think about what would happen if she worked for your company. How would you handle that? Is there literally any way you can think of in how people are currently rated, assessed, and compensated that could handle something like that? She’s an exceptional case, let’s take it down several notches - what if you have a dev or a sales person or an HRPB who shows a remarkable ability to condense important information and share it in a way that people find not only palatable but compelling?

I’m rambling because I am deeply engaged with this idea of an internal creator economy that can recognize stars in our own ranks that can do jobs incredibly well and they might not be jobs we’ve even thought about yet. I don’t want us to lose those people. I want us to be ready on the technical front, on the HR front, and on the infosec front to welcome them and their gifts. So help me out here…what do we need to make this happen? What will our internal creator economy look like?