Theta Launches Theta Assist: A Secure, Cost-Effective AI Chat Tool for Staff

Most of us use ChatGPT (according to our survey….)

Although we’re pretty advanced in our GenAI journey at Theta (we use AI in several products and projects and have a GenAI Centre of Excellence), we’re not totally immune to the challenges that GenAI tools have created - especially for staff use of AI.

In fact, we recently did a staff survey and learnt some interesting things:

1. Many of our team often use GenAI in their day-to-day work. Most commonly, ChatGPT.
2. Equally, a fair number aren’t using anything and aren’t sure what to use or how to use it best.
3. Many people would like a tool they could rely on for work – and some help to use it.

In response to our survey, we considered options for expanding access, including piloting tools like full Copilot and ChatGPT Pro. While it makes sense for some people to have paid licenses, both these tools would be very expensive to provide for everyone across the organisation, and Copilot* needs a fair bit of prep in the data governance space.

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Introducing: BYO (Build-Your-Own) AI Tool, Theta Assist

We realised the need to provide a secure, budget-friendly alternative to ChatGPT. Our answer was to build our own company-wide AI chat tool, Theta Assist.

There are several advantages to a ‘build-your-own’ approach vs paying for a publicly available tool like ChatGPT:

1. Shifting away from public tools that may not have the appropriate privacy settings, even with company guidance. All data is fully secured, which is crucial when dealing with confidential information. It is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and none of it is used for training AI models. Our staff must use a secure login process to access the tool.
2. Our staff have access to the latest OpenAI tech (which the tool is powered by). This is often a step up from the free versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.
3. Cost-wise, it’s a no-brainer: the API to OpenAI costs USD$5 per ~750,000 words of input and USD$15 per ~750,000 words of output (1 million tokens). In other words, it's unlikely anyone will use it enough to match the ChatGPT per-seat pro licence cost of 1 user. Of course, the platform has some hosting costs, but even then, it’s modest in comparison.
4. Unlike tools like Copilot, little or no data governance prep is required, so rollout is very quick.
5. You can take an MVP approach (as we did) and keep tailoring it to meet your organisational requirements until it’s entirely fit for purpose. If you’re interested in doing this too, let’s talk.
6. We also added an in-app help feature (using our Helpfruit product) so staff can easily understand how to use the tool.

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Theta Assist and its 'assistants'

A challenge when guiding tools like ChatGPT to produce the desired output is they often require multiple conversation turns to get the right outcome.

For example, you upload a document and ask:

“Summarise this document”

You receive a summary, but it’s not in the correct tone. So, you need to add another instruction:

“Make it less formal and more customer friendly”

You receive the output, but it’s too long:

“Make it more concise”

This might go on and on until, finally, you receive the output you’re looking for.

We aimed to mitigate this problem with Theta Assist by creating fine-tuned versions, called ‘assistants,’ each designed to address specific challenges.

Theta Assist’s ‘general assistant’ handles most queries, while customised assistants target specific challenges. For example, the ‘document glossary assistant' extracts key terms from documents. You simply upload a document with a short prompt, and it provides the glossary for you in the format you need, straight away – no lengthy instructional prompts necessary.  

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Get started

In conversations with customers, we hear the growing pressure to integrate Generative AI into their operations. Coming from both the board and exec team, there's certainly a sentiment of ‘we need to do something with GenAI’. We know – we felt it in our own business too, and that’s how Theta Assist was born!

However, concerns about privacy risks, hallucinations, and data governance are high on the list of blockers - as is the perceived high cost of per-seat licences for tools. It’s easy to get bogged down in this - especially when trying to move from a small pilot to a wider rollout.

That’s where Theta can help. Whether you want to get your own in-house version of Theta Assist up and running, book a GenAI strategy workshop, or trial your use cases quickly, securely, and cost-effectively, we can help your organisation progress with GenAI.  

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*What about Copilot?

We see Theta Assist as a replacement for ChatGPT.

Microsoft Copilot offers additional advantages because it’s built into many of your existing Microsoft tools, but it does require more preparation before rollout. We can assist with this as well - check out our Copilot Readiness Assessment.