Chegg Says ChatGPT Is Affecting Its Customer Growth Rate, Stock Falls 38%

Thus far, there had been indications that ChatGPT could disrupt many companies and businesses, but we might have seen its first major impact yet.

Education company Chegg, which helps students with their learning outcomes and assignments, has said that ChatGPT is affecting its customer growth rate. This remark appeared to cause Wall Street to panic, and Chegg’s stock fell 38 percent in after hours trading.

“In the first part of the year, we saw no noticeable impact from ChatGPT on our new account growth and we were meeting expectations on new sign-ups. However, since March we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it’s having an impact on our new customer growth rate,” Chegg said in its earnings call.

Cheggg meanwhile has partnered with OpenAI to create a new product called CheggMate, which will be powered by AI. “CheggMate will harness the power of ChatGPT, paired with our proprietary data and subject matter experts, to make learning more personalized, adaptive, accurate, fast, and effective – all in an easy to use and conversational manner. The combination of Chegg’s experience over the last 13 years of improving student outcomes, and our proprietary learning taxonomy, the 150,000 subject matter experts in our network, and the billions of pieces of unique learning content that Chegg owns, when coupled with the real-time conversational nature of ChatGPT will establish CheggMate as a powerful and distinctive learning tool, offered exclusively from Chegg,” the earnings call said.

Investors, however weren’t thrilled at the announcement of a new AI product, but chose to focus on how ChatGPT was affecting Chegg’s growth rate, pummeling the stock. This is the lowest value to which Chegg’s stock has fallen since 2017.

Sadly, this is a story that might repeat itself frequently over the next few months. ChatGPT is proficient at so many tasks, and is so cheap, that it might end up disrupting a whole host of businesses. Instead of having several different subscriptions, ChatGPT might become the only digital assistant that people use, which could come as bad news for hundreds of vertical specific businesses, such as Chegg, around the world.