Auto Fill
Makes it easy for users to extend a prompt to multiple inputs at once
Overview:
Users of spreadsheets and databases are already familiar with the concept of auto fill. Affordances in tools like Excel have made this capability easily discoverable for years.
It’s no surprise then that this familiar paradigm is being extended to include GenAI capabilities.
- Before: A user of Google Sheets might insert a date in the first cell of a column and be prompted to auto-fill dates for the remaining cells in order or based off of some formula
- Now: A user might tell the system to capture the date of incorporation for everyone company in a database, and rely on the model to return those dates automatically into the column
This pattern is a clear example of the agentive nature of Artificial Intelligence to complete mundane tasks and save us time. The implications here are especially powerful when considering large data modeling of proprietary information, and the ability to connect people with information that has been available to them but buried.
For example, imagine a Customer Success Manager creating a spreadsheet of their customers, and using Auto Fill to capture usage data, risk assessments, and the names of their key stakeholders in one place ahead of a Quarterly Business Review.
Like other uses, this request type could be susceptible to mis-information. Trust markers like confidence indicators or fingerprints such as direct links to the scrapped sources should be considered to provide for easy human-review of the results.
Benefits:
Anti-patterns:
Proprietary exposure
It's far more likely that someone would be sharing personal or propriety data in spreadsheets, compared to open-ended prompt generation. There is a reason large companies are restricting their employees from sharing this data with public LLMs. Consider the security implications of this feature.
