2023 - 07 - How To Train Generative Ai Using Your Companys Data

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How to Train Generative AI

Using Your Company’s Data
Three ways companies like Bloomberg, Google, and Morgan Stanley
are embedding their intellectual capital into large language models.
by Tom Davenport and Maryam Alavi
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HBR / Digital Article / How to Train Generative AI Using Your Company’s Data
How to Train Generative AI

Using Your Company’s Data
Three ways companies like Bloomberg, Google, and Morgan Stanley
are embedding their intellectual capital into large language models.
by Tom Davenport and Maryam Alavi
Published on HBR.org / July 06, 2023 / Reprint H07PNV
Anton Vierietin/Getty Images
Many companies are experimenting with ChatGPT and other large

language or image models. They have generally found them to be
astounding in terms of their ability to express complex ideas in
articulate language. However, most users realize that these systems are
primarily trained on internet-based information and can’t respond to
prompts or questions regarding proprietary content or knowledge.
Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 1
Leveraging a company’s propriety knowledge is critical to its ability

to compete and innovate, especially in today’s volatile environment.
Organizational Innovation is fueled through effective and agile
creation, management, application, recombination, and deployment
of knowledge assets and know-how. However, knowledge within
organizations is typically generated and captured across various sources
and forms, including individual minds, processes, policies, reports,
operational transactions, discussion boards, and online chats and
meetings. As such, a company’s comprehensive knowledge is often
unaccounted for and difficult to organize and deploy where needed in
an effective or efficient way.
Emerging technologies in the form of large language and image

generative AI models offer new opportunities for knowledge
management, thereby enhancing company performance, learning, and
innovation capabilities. For example, in a study conducted in a Fortune
500 provider of business process software, a generative AI-based
system for customer support led to increased productivity of customer
support agents and improved retention, while leading to higher positive
feedback on the part of customers. The system also expedited the
learning and skill development of novice agents.
Like that company, a growing number of organizations are attempting

to leverage the language processing skills and general reasoning abilities
of large language models (LLMs) to capture and provide broad internal
(or customer) access to their own intellectual capital. They are using
it for such purposes as informing their customer-facing employees
on company policy and product/service recommendations, solving
customer service problems, or capturing employees’ knowledge before
they depart the organization.
These objectives were also present during the heyday of the “knowledge
management” movement in the 1990s and early 2000s, but most
companies found the technology of the time inadequate for the task.
Today, however, generative AI is rekindling the possibility of capturing
and disseminating important knowledge throughout an organization
and beyond its walls. As one manager using generative AI for this
purpose put it, “I feel like a jetpack just came into my life.” Despite
current advances, some of the same factors that made knowledge
management difficult in the past are still present.
The Technology for Generative AI-Based Knowledge Management
The technology to incorporate an organization’s specific domain

knowledge into an LLM is evolving rapidly. At the moment there are
three primary approaches to incorporating proprietary content into a
generative model.
Training an LLM from Scratch

One approach is to create and train one’s own domain-specific model
from scratch. That’s not a common approach, since it requires a massive
amount of high-quality data to train a large language model, and most
companies simply don’t have it. It also requires access to considerable
computing power and well-trained data science talent.
One company that has employed this approach is Bloomberg, which

recently announced that it had created BloombergGPT for finance-
specific content and a natural-language interface with its data terminal.
Bloomberg has over 40 years’ worth of financial data, news, and
documents, which it combined with a large volume of text from
financial filings and internet data. In total, Bloomberg’s data scientists
employed 700 billion tokens, or about 350 billion words, 50 billion
parameters, and 1.3 million hours of graphics processing unit time. Few
companies have those resources available.
Fine-Tuning an Existing LLM

A second approach is to “fine-tune” train an existing LLM to add
specific domain content to a system that is already trained on general
knowledge and language-based interaction. This approach involves
adjusting some parameters of a base model, and typically requires
substantially less data — usually only hundreds or thousands of
documents, rather than millions or billions — and less computing time
than creating a new model from scratch.
Google, for example, used fine-tune training on its Med-PaLM2 (second

version) model for medical knowledge. The research project started
with Google’s general PaLM2 LLM and retrained it on carefully curated
medical knowledge from a variety of public medical datasets. The model
was able to answer 85% of U.S. medical licensing exam questions —
almost 20% better than the first version of the system. Despite this rapid
progress, when tested on such criteria as scientific factuality, precision,
medical consensus, reasoning, bias and harm, and evaluated by human
experts from multiple countries, the development team felt that the
system still needed substantial improvement before being adopted for
clinical practice.
The fine-tuning approach has some constraints, however. Although

requiring much less computing power and time than training an LLM,
it can still be expensive to train, which was not a problem for Google
but would be for many other companies. It requires considerable
data science expertise; the scientific paper for the Google project, for
example, had 31 co-authors. Some data scientists argue that it is best
suited not to adding new content, but rather to adding new content
formats and styles (such as chat or writing like William Shakespeare).
Additionally, some LLM vendors (for example, OpenAI) do not allow
fine-tuning on their latest LLMs, such as GPT-4.
Prompt-tuning an Existing LLM

Perhaps the most common approach to customizing the content of an
LLM for non-cloud vendor companies is to tune it through prompts.
With this approach, the original model is kept frozen, and is modified
through prompts in the context window that contain domain-specific
knowledge. After prompt tuning, the model can answer questions
related to that knowledge. This approach is the most computationally
efficient of the three, and it does not require a vast amount of data to be
trained on a new content domain.
Morgan Stanley, for example, used prompt tuning to train OpenAI’s

GPT-4 model using a carefully curated set of 100,000 documents
with important investing, general business, and investment process
knowledge. The goal was to provide the company’s financial advisors
with accurate and easily accessible knowledge on key issues they
encounter in their roles advising clients. The prompt-trained system
is operated in a private cloud that is only accessible to Morgan Stanley
employees.
While this is perhaps the easiest of the three approaches for an

organization to adopt, it is not without technical challenges. When
using unstructured data like text as input to an LLM, the data is likely
to be too large with too many important attributes to enter it directly
in the context window for the LLM. The alternative is to create vector
embeddings — arrays of numeric values produced from the text by
another pre-trained machine learning model (Morgan Stanley uses one
from OpenAI called Ada). The vector embeddings are a more compact
representation of this data which preserves contextual relationships in
the text. When a user enters a prompt into the system, a similarity
algorithm determines which vectors should be submitted to the GPT-4
model. Although several vendors are offering tools to make this process
of prompt tuning easier, it is still complex enough that most companies
adopting the approach would need to have substantial data science

talent.
However, this approach does not need to be very time-consuming or

expensive if the needed content is already present. The investment
research company Morningstar, for example, used prompt tuning and
vector embeddings for its Mo research tool built on generative AI. It
incorporates more than 10,000 pieces of Morningstar research. After
only a month or so of work on its system, Morningstar opened Mo
usage to their financial advisors and independent investor customers.
It even attached Mo to a digital avatar that could speak out its answers.
This technical approach is not expensive; in its first month in use, Mo
answered 25,000 questions at an average cost of $.002 per question for a
total cost of $3,000.
Content Curation and Governance
As with traditional knowledge management in which documents

were loaded into discussion databases like Microsoft Sharepoint, with
generative AI, content needs to be high-quality before customizing
LLMs in any fashion. In some cases, as with the Google Med-PaLM2
system, there are widely available databases of medical knowledge that
have already been curated. Otherwise, a company needs to rely on
human curation to ensure that knowledge content is accurate, timely,
and not duplicated. Morgan Stanley, for example, has a group of 20 or
so knowledge managers in the Philippines who are constantly scoring
documents along multiple criteria; these determine the suitability for
incorporation into the GPT-4 system. Most companies that do not
have well-curated content will find it challenging to do so for just this
purpose.
Morgan Stanley has also found that it is much easier to maintain

high quality knowledge if content authors are aware of how to create
effective documents. They are required to take two courses, one on the
document management tool, and a second on how to write and tag
these documents. This is a component of the company’s approach to
content governance approach — a systematic method for capturing and
managing important digital content.
At Morningstar, content creators are being taught what type of content

works well with the Mo system and what does not. They submit their
content into a content management system and it goes directly into the
vector database that supplies the OpenAI model.
Quality Assurance and Evaluation
An important aspect of managing generative AI content is ensuring

quality. Generative AI is widely known to “hallucinate” on occasion,
confidently stating facts that are incorrect or nonexistent. Errors of
this type can be problematic for businesses but could be deadly in
healthcare applications. The good news is that companies who have
tuned their LLMs on domain-specific information have found that
hallucinations are less of a problem than out-of-the-box LLMs, at least if
there are no extended dialogues or non-business prompts.
Companies adopting these approaches to generative AI knowledge

management should develop an evaluation strategy. For example, for
BloombergGPT, which is intended for answering financial and investing
questions, the system was evaluated on public dataset financial tasks,
named entity recognition, sentiment analysis ability, and a set of
reasoning and general natural language processing tasks. The Google
Med-PaLM2 system, eventually oriented to answering patient and
physician medical questions, had a much more extensive evaluation
strategy, reflecting the criticality of accuracy and safety in the medical
domain.
Life or death isn’t an issue at Morgan Stanley, but producing highly

accurate responses to financial and investing questions is important
to the firm, its clients, and its regulators. The answers provided by
the system were carefully evaluated by human reviewers before it
was released to any users. Then it was piloted for several months by
300 financial advisors. As its primary approach to ongoing evaluation,
Morgan Stanley has a set of 400 “golden questions” to which the correct
answers are known. Every time any change is made to the system,
employees test it with the golden questions to see if there has been any
“regression,” or less accurate answers.
Legal and Governance Issues
Legal and governance issues associated with LLM deployments are

complex and evolving, leading to risk factors involving intellectual
property, data privacy and security, bias and ethics, and false/
inaccurate output. Currently, the legal status of LLM outputs is still
unclear. Since LLMs don’t produce exact replicas of any of the text used
to train the model, many legal observers feel that “fair use” provisions
of copyright law will apply to them, although this hasn’t been tested in
the courts (and not all countries have such provisions in their copyright
laws). In any case, it is a good idea for any company making extensive
use of generative AI for managing knowledge (or most other purposes
for that matter) to have legal representatives involved in the creation
and governance process for tuned LLMs. At Morningstar, for example,
the company’s attorneys helped create a series of “pre-prompts” that tell
the generative AI system what types of questions it should answer and
those it should politely avoid.
User prompts into publicly-available LLMs are used to train future

versions of the system, so some companies (Samsung, for example) have
feared propagation of confidential and private information and banned
LLM use by employees. However, most companies’ efforts to tune LLMs
with domain-specific content are performed on private instances of the

models that are not accessible to public users, so this should not be
a problem. In addition, some generative AI systems such as ChatGPT
allow users to turn off the collection of chat histories, which can address
confidentiality issues even on public systems.
In order to address confidentiality and privacy concerns, some vendors

are providing advanced and improved safety and security features
for LLMs including erasing user prompts, restricting certain topics,
and preventing source code and propriety data inputs into publicly
accessible LLMs. Furthermore, vendors of enterprise software systems
are incorporating a “Trust Layer” in their products and services.
Salesforce, for example, incorporated its Einstein GPT feature into its
AI Cloud suite to address the “AI Trust Gap” between companies who
desire to quickly deploy LLM capabilities and the aforementioned risks
that these systems pose in business environments.
Shaping User Behavior
Ease of use, broad public availability, and useful answers that span
various knowledge domains have led to rapid and somewhat unguided
and organic adoption of generative AI-based knowledge management
by employees. For example, a recent survey indicated that more than
a third of surveyed employees used generative AI in their jobs, but
68% of respondents didn’t inform their supervisors that they were
using the tool. To realize opportunities and manage potential risks of
generative AI applications to knowledge management, companies need
to develop a culture of transparency and accountability that would
make generative AI-based knowledge management systems successful.
In addition to implementation of policies and guidelines, users need

to understand how to safely and effectively incorporate generative AI
capabilities into their tasks to enhance performance and productivity.
Generative AI capabilities, including awareness of context and history,

generating new content by aggregating or combining knowledge
from various sources, and data-driven predictions, can provide
powerful support for knowledge work. Generative AI-based knowledge
management systems can automate information-intensive search
processes (legal case research, for example) as well as high-volume
and low-complexity cognitive tasks such as answering routine customer
emails. This approach increases efficiency of employees, freeing them to
put more effort into the complex decision-making and problem-solving
aspects of their jobs.
Some specific behaviors that might be desirable to inculcate — either

though training or policies — include:
• Knowledge of what types of content are available through the system;

• How to create effective prompts;
• What types of prompts and dialogues are allowed, and which ones are
not;
• How to request additional knowledge content to be added to the
system;
• How to use the system’s responses in dealing with customers and
partners;
• How to create new content in a useful and effective manner.
Both Morgan Stanley and Morningstar trained content creators in

particular on how best to create and tag content, and what types of
content are well-suited to generative AI usage.
“Everything Is Moving Very Fast”
One of the executives we interviewed said, “I can tell you what things
are like today. But everything is moving very fast in this area.” New
LLMs and new approaches to tuning their content are announced daily,
as are new products from vendors with specific content or task foci.
Any company that commits to embedding its own knowledge into a
generative AI system should be prepared to revise its approach to the
issue frequently over the next several years.
While there are many challenging issues involved in building and using
generative AI systems trained on a company’s own knowledge content,
we’re confident that the overall benefit to the company is worth the
effort to address these challenges. The long-term vision of enabling
any employee — and customers as well — to easily access important
knowledge within and outside of a company to enhance productivity
and innovation is a powerful draw. Generative AI appears to be the
technology that is finally making it possible.
This article was originally published online on July 06, 2023.
Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of

IT and Management at Babson College, a research fellow at the MIT
Center for Digital Business, co-founder of the International Institute
for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He is author
of the new book Big Data at Work and the best-selling Competing on
Analytics.
Maryam Alavi is the Elizabeth D. & Thomas M. Holder Chair &

Professor of IT Management, Scheller College of Business, Georgia
Institute of Technology.

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Digital

Technology and Analytics

How to Train Generative AI

How to Train Generative AI

Anton Vierietin/Getty Images

Many companies are experimenting with ChatGPT and other large

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 1

Leveraging a company’s propriety knowledge is critical to its ability

Emerging technologies in the form of large language and image

Like that company, a growing number of organizations are attempting

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 2

The Technology for Generative AI-Based Knowledge Management

The technology to incorporate an organization’s specific domain

Training an LLM from Scratch

One company that has employed this approach is Bloomberg, which

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 3

Fine-Tuning an Existing LLM

Google, for example, used fine-tune training on its Med-PaLM2 (second

The fine-tuning approach has some constraints, however. Although

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 4

Prompt-tuning an Existing LLM

Morgan Stanley, for example, used prompt tuning to train OpenAI’s

While this is perhaps the easiest of the three approaches for an

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 5

adopting the approach would need to have substantial data science

However, this approach does not need to be very time-consuming or

Content Curation and Governance

As with traditional knowledge management in which documents

Morgan Stanley has also found that it is much easier to maintain

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 6

At Morningstar, content creators are being taught what type of content

Quality Assurance and Evaluation

An important aspect of managing generative AI content is ensuring

Companies adopting these approaches to generative AI knowledge

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 7

Life or death isn’t an issue at Morgan Stanley, but producing highly

Legal and Governance Issues

Legal and governance issues associated with LLM deployments are

User prompts into publicly-available LLMs are used to train future

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 8

with domain-specific content are performed on private instances of the

In order to address confidentiality and privacy concerns, some vendors

Shaping User Behavior

In addition to implementation of policies and guidelines, users need

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 9

Generative AI capabilities, including awareness of context and history,

Some specific behaviors that might be desirable to inculcate — either

• Knowledge of what types of content are available through the system;

Both Morgan Stanley and Morningstar trained content creators in

“Everything Is Moving Very Fast”

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 10

This article was originally published online on July 06, 2023.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of

Maryam Alavi is the Elizabeth D. & Thomas M. Holder Chair &

Copyright © 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. 11

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