ChatGPT's productivity upgrade and your new AI coworkers

Welcome to ZDNET’s Innovation Index, which identifies the most innovative developments in tech from the past week and ranks the top four, based on votes from our panel of editors and experts. Our mission is to help you identify the trends that will have the biggest impact on the future.

Kicking us off this week is OpenAI and Canvas, a new co-editing ChatGPT feature. As ZDNET editor Sabrina Ortiz explained, despite looking like a simple interface change, Canvas makes a big difference in working with ChatGPT by allowing users to compare their original text to ChatGPT’s suggestions instead of just replacing it. This feature makes ChatGPT an actual copilot-style assistant for iterating on written work, which Ortiz believes is a significant improvement for the AI tool. The development comes at an interesting time for OpenAI, which reportedly does not predict being profitable for another five years. But could an upgrade like this pull in enough ChatGPT Plus users to shrink that timeline? 

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In a rare tie, two stories made spot #2 this week: cybersecurity professionals turning to AI for help, and a survey found that 82% of organizations plan to implement agentic AI in the next three years. 

Cybersecurity teams are fed up with insufficiencies in their detectors — and the vendors behind them. As ZDNET senior contributing editor Eileen Yu explained, a survey found that 89% of security ops centers plan to replace legacy threat detection applications with AI tools over the next year. Those tools have already helped reduce workload and burnout by over 70%. A bigger-picture move toward AI could mark a lasting change in how security teams operate, what those teams look like, and what the future of threat detection technology looks like. Get the full breakdown here.

Meanwhile, the agentic AI predictions keep on coming. Referring to the tech as “the new electricity”, ZDNET contributor Vala Afshar analyzed a Capgemini survey of over 1,000 executives planning on implementing autonomous AI systems soon. The survey found the biggest use case for agentic AI will be in developing software, with similarly lofty expectations across customer service, workflow automation, and productivity — all of which are anticipated to outweigh any risks. Based on this research, Ashar broke down the critical and inevitable role of agentic AI in the future of business, making a strong case for why leaders should pay attention. 

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Closing out the Index this week is Google, which launched a global anti-scam initiative with the help of some partners. The company’s new Global Signal Exchange (GSE) aims to compile online fraud resources to identify and catch scams. In its early stages, the initiative caught “more than 100,000 URLs of fraudulent retailers” and one million scam reports, ZDNET contributor Lance Whitney said. The GSE will set its sights on suspicious Google Shopping links and use AI to identify patterns. If the tool makes good on its promises, it could set a higher standard for tech companies moving consumer protections upstream — similar to data privacy initiatives that automatically create better, safer environments and products, rather than leaving the onus on the user to navigate security individually.