Mostly Serious launches AI-powered plug-in

A Springfield website design and digital marketing company’s investment in artificial intelligence has resulted in a product that officials say will aid website content creators in improving the speed and accuracy of their work.

Mostly Serious LLC earlier this month launched Promptly, a custom AI-powered plug-in for Craft content management system-based websites. The plug-in allows users to employ the same AI technology behind ChatGPT for use in producing website content, said Mostly Serious CEO Jarad Johnson. Promptly uses customized ChatGPT prompts to aid people with tasks. 

“It allows people to brainstorm headlines, different topic ideas and solve the blank page problem by just getting it to write some opening paragraphs for them,” he said, noting users also can create their own prompts. “Another feature is editing, so they can edit spelling and grammar and quickly clean up writing on the website. They can adjust the length of content and translate to a variety of different languages, which is a major cost saving over manual translation services.”

Johnson said he’s heard from clients that high-quality manual translations can cost “between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, depending on the amount of writing and the number of languages.”

It’s been a three-month process for Mostly Serious to develop Promptly, Johnson said, declining to disclose the company’s financial investment. He said he’s devoted roughly one-third of his time at the office this year to AI development work.

“One of our team members has reduced their capacity down to 20% for client work so that we can put 80% of their time toward AI development,” he said, noting the agency began using ChatGPT a few months ago. “We have found it to be an extraordinary tool for us. We use it essentially as a co-pilot for our team. We want to give them a tool that accelerates their work, and we found that it’s not going to replace the task completely. It’s not going to do the hard work for you.”

ChatGPT, launched by research lab OpenAI in November 2022, had 1 million users in its first five days and reached 100 million monthly users by January of this year, according to media reports.

Promptly can be purchased through the Craft CMS website for $99, which includes one year of updates, Johnson said. The annual cost is then $49 per site for additional updates.

“What we wanted to do was instead of just creating kind of a sandbox that people have to figure out how to use the tool themselves, we wanted to create prompts that are structured like, ‘Give me topic ideas’ or ‘Write an opening paragraph for this topic.’ We wanted to give some clear lines of prompt ideas that allowed people to get started without having to know how to instruct the AI themselves,” he said.

While the plug-in is available to the public, Johnson said his company is targeting its clients with the AI tool.

“Our primary focus is how can we help our clients when it comes to things like blogging, such as generating a list of blog post topic ideas and suggesting new approaches to subject matter that they want to write about,” he said, noting the agency has 46 clients, including Community Foundation of the Ozarks, CoxHealth and SMC Packaging Group.

Most of the company’s clients have websites built with Craft CMS, Johnson said, and the platform is used by national brands like Netflix and Adidas.

Mostly Serious currently is testing out Promptly with a few undisclosed clients, he added.

“We’ve been in sort of a soft launch period where we launched it and we’ve been correcting any bugs, making some feature additions that we really wanted to get out there before we spread the word too much,” he said.

Johnson said Promptly can create content for websites already launched but doesn’t help with the site’s design or development.

“After we’ve launched the website or after we’ve gotten it to a point where our clients are working with us to add the writing onto the website, we can then use the plug-in to accelerate that process,” he said.

Promptly joins a growing marketplace of products that use AI technology. Some notable examples are Amazon Alexa, IBM Watson and Cortana. Springfield company Carefully Crafted LLC, which formed in May, also is involved in the AI space. It launched Hey There, a custom AI platform that has over 200 personas that provide specialized assistance to users, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting.

Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Gartner projects worldwide IT spending will total $4.5 trillion in 2023, a 2.4% increase from 2022. The IT services sector is projected to grow 5.5% this year to $1.3 trillion.

Global sending on AI, including software, hardware and services for AI-centric services, is projected to reach $154 billion, according to Needham, Massachusetts-based consulting firm International Data Corp. The total would be a nearly 27% increase over the amount spent in 2022.

Even as Promptly rolls out, Johnson said the company already has a roadmap for updates, adding the timing of those is still to be determined.

“One of those big features we want to add is image generation, so people can create stock photography using AI directly with the plug-in for their website,” he said, noting the company is testing Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion platforms to build the feature. “That will be one of the next big feature additions that we’ll launch. It’s currently in development and we’re testing it. It will all depend on when it hits a quality that we’re satisfied with.”