- Akash Nigam, the founder of Genies, purchased ChatGPT Plus accounts for all of his 120 employees.
- The AI chatbot has helped automate tasks and generate creative briefs.
A CEO is spending thousands each month buying ChatGPT Plus accounts for every single employee at his company — and he says he's already seeing gains.
Akash Nigam, the founder of Genies — the $1 billion avatar tools company used by celebrities like Justin Bieber and Cardi B — is spending $2,400 a month on ChatGPT Plus accounts for all of his 120 employees as part of an experiment to boost productivity and save money. Insider verified the purchase of the accounts with a receipt.
In March, Nigam started encouraging every team — research and development, engineering, product, finance, design, and accounting — to learn how to use the AI chatbot to automate monotonous tasks. Despite the investment, Nigam believes that the integration of ChatGPT into his teams' workflows will improve the company's bottom line.
"I'm a pretty frugal, stingy person," Nigam told Insider. "But in my mind, this is for the health and growth of the company."
While it has only been a month since Genies' employees have had their accounts, Nigam said he has "already seen many tasks get accelerated."
Genies' R&D team, for instance, has used ChatGPT to answer math and coding questions, get advice on how to debug code, and generate scripts for presentations based on outlines, he said. Other employees have used it to generate creative briefs, write legal documents like internal policies, and answer technical questions.
Nigam said ChatGPT has been most helpful in creating a technical roadmap, or an outline that lays out a company's strategy around releasing a new product. The process of making a plan, he said, "would normally require hours and hours" of manual brainstorming among colleagues. Instead, he fed ChatGPT all the information needed in the plan, then asked the AI to organize it in a chart and delegate the tasks to the right teams.
"It's almost like you have the most sophisticated operating partner at your disposal that's able to quickly center your thoughts and ensure that you're consistently on track," he said.
Nigam believes that the bot may be able to help his company reduce costs as it will need to hire fewer employees.
ChatGPT has boosted productivity, though some workers aren't using it
While he said the majority of the employees are "diving in headfirst" with ChatGPT, there's a "small fraction" of people who are "passively integrating it" into their workflows, whether that's due to lack of time or care.
Genies has been holding informal workshops where the employees who are "really obsessed" and "leaning in" to ChatGPT teach coworkers with less experience how to use the AI to perform specific tasks across teams.
Nigam believes that everybody at his company must be committed to using ChatGPT for the company to reap the benefits of reduced workloads and headcount.
"You really got to find time to like learn this skill, because it's gonna be really important moving forward," he said.
He even plans on making ChatGPT usage a part of his employees' performance reviews next year. Part of the reviews, he said, will look at how his employees use tools like ChatGPT to "effectively accelerate" their departments.
The employees that are "using AI effectively" will be up for a promotion and raise, he said. The ones who aren't will fall behind.
Genies isn't the only company incorporating ChatGPT into its workflow.
Amazon's employees are using the AI to develop code, answer customer questions, and write training documents. David Litwin, the CEO of Pure Fusion Media, a design firm, said ChatGPT saved him more than 30 hours of work in one week. Even Microsoft is letting employees use ChatGPT — as long as they don't share confidential information with the tool.