AI for Business Owners: A Brief Guide

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic that business owners and entrepreneurs need to be aware of. It is here to stay and will change the world in a similar way to how the internet once did. However, many people get scared by the technicalities of AI. This guide aims to provide a non-technical overview of the topic.

We are at a tipping point now, where AI can be used by non-coders and non-technical people. While building AI still requires technical expertise, using it is now much easier than before. In fact, using many AI tools is easier than using some of the software tools we used before.

The recent explosion of interest in AI can be attributed, in part, to the release of ChatGPT 3. This AI interface allows everyday users to access AI and work with it via simple chat prompts. The impact of this interface is hard to overestimate.

As a business owner it's imperative you get an overview of the situation and start to explore how these tools and technologies can be integrated into your business. This technological shift is happening and it's important to not stick your head in the sand.?

Often people worry about AI taking the jobs of humans. The truth is it is the humans who use AI who will take the jobs of humans who do not use AI. The same goes for businesses. Those who utilise AI will completely demolish those who do not in the next few years. We've prepped this brief guide to act as an orientation, give you an idea of how AI can be used and provide a few additional resources to learn more.?

A basic example

Let's start with a very mundane example of a day to day efficiency. The idea here is to show a real world example that will save a business time and money and (hopefully) has parallels in your business.,?

Let's consider a scenario where a business owner needs to clean up customer data that is in a mess. Normally, they would have to hire someone to do this task manually. However, with AI, they can provide all the information to the AI and tell it, in natural language, what needs to be done.?

For instance, they could ask the AI to find all records from a specific staff member and convert their deal amounts from British pounds into US dollars using the exchange rate from the date of the deal.

The AI will find all of the staff member's records, convert the amounts based on historical foreign exchange rates, and complete the task in seconds. Without AI, the options would have been either manually checking and correcting the records or building a piece of custom code to fix the issue, which could be expensive and/or time-consuming.

Using free AI tools, business owners can write in natural language what needs to be fixed, and the AI will complete the task in seconds. This does not require technical knowledge, just the ability to give the AI the right instructions for the task.

It’s worth reiterating here that usually we’d need to either manually check (using manpower) and then manually correct these records. Or we could build a piece of code specifically to fix the currency hiccup. These would have been the two main options on the table before.?

Now though, using free AI tools, we can simply write - in natural language - what the problem is and what we want to fix.?

How to use AI in your business

As a business owner, you might be eager to explore the potential of AI. However, asking what AI can do for us is not very helpful because its uses are practically unlimited and constantly evolving.

Instead, start by identifying tasks or areas in your business that need improvement, and then see if AI can assist you. Tech can be a valuable tool to solve problems, automate tasks, speed up processes, and reduce costs. Therefore, before making any tech decisions, begin by assessing your business requirements and generating a list of potential problems or areas for optimization.

It's useful to think of AI as a highly skill yet inexperienced staff member. They can understand and perform pretty much any task (and I mean?any?task) you throw at them as long as you provide the correct instructions and context. We wouldn't expect a brand new hire to be able to do everything but for some reason we expect an AI to understand us without clear instructions and context.?

If we change how we think and consider AIs like a new hire then their utility becomes a lot clearer. What would you want to train a new hire to do in your company? Start here with the AI too.?

Getting started : Play

To get a better sense of AI's potential, it's a good idea to play around with some AI tools. OpenAI's ChatGPT is an excellent place to start, and it's free to use. You can sign up at?https://chat.openai.com ?using your email and gain access. While ChatGPT 3 is free, ChatGPT 4 is paid, and it will likely become the standard in the future. To fully experience the power of AI, it's recommended that you invest in a ChatGPT 4 subscription.

Once you have access, literally start chatting with ChatGPT and ask it about its capabilities and limitations.

Test its creativity by asking it to write a song or a Shakespearean sonnet in Spanish using palindromes.

Check its generative ability by having it write a blog article or draft a speech or pitch document outline related to your business. If ChatGPT gets something wrong, tell it?specifically?what it misunderstood, and ask for changes.?

Treat it like a person, and it will improve over time. Playing around with AI tools can help you understand its potential and inspire you to be more creative with how you deploy it in your business.

Once you've had some hands-on experience with ChatGPT, you'll start to see the possibilities it offers. However, working solely within the ChatGPT interface can be limiting. To make the most of ChatGPT's potential and incorporate it into your business workflow, you need to connect it to other tools that you use. Plugins and extensions are the solutions to this problem.

Extending functionality

Plugins are authorized integrations that have been approved by ChatGPT, and you can find them in the ChatGPT marketplace at?https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins . At the moment, the marketplace is limited, but it's likely to expand rapidly.

Extensions, on the other hand, are built on top of ChatGPT's API, and they can be used to enhance its functionality. These are not officially licensed, but they use the underlying ChatGPT technology. A comprehensive list of extensions is not possible because it changes every day, and some functions are already integrated into ChatGPT, making unofficial extensions worthless. Nevertheless, a few useful extensions currently available include:

- WebChatGPT: This extension gives ChatGPT access to Google, enabling it to perform searches and gather new data. It's perfect for research, keeping tabs on competitors, and condensing news.

- ChatGPT for Google: This extension allows you to use ChatGPT alongside your Google search results, so you can ask both Google and ChatGPT for information at the same time.

- GPT for Sheets and Docs: This extension enables you to use ChatGPT within Google Sheets and Docs (the Google versions of Excel and Word). It's especially useful in Excel, where you can use it to write formulas with text prompts like "take everything in this cell, give me an average, and order the averages highest to lowest."

- tweetGPT: This extension adds ChatGPT to Twitter, enabling you to generate responses and new tweets using AI.

- Promptheus: This extension adds voice recognition to make ChatGPT more like Siri.

- Merlin: This writing assistant can read and write for you. In reading mode, Merlin will summarize articles and emails for you, giving you a quick precis. In writing mode, Merlin can also generate responses to emails and social media messages.

These extensions can make ChatGPT more useful in your day-to-day business. To get the most out of ChatGPT, audit the tools you currently use in your business and search for integrations by combining their names with "ChatGPT" or "AI" in Google.

For instance, if your business uses Gmail for business emails, ChatGPT for Gmail or ChatGPT Writer may be helpful.

?If you use Slack for team communication, there's now a native ChatGPT app that works inside Slack.

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If you want to speed up processes in your CRM, it's very likely that your CRM software will now have a ChatGPT integration or something natively working inside the CRM. Be sure to check what's on offer.

AI tools will increasingly be implemented directly into the everyday business tools we are using. For example, Microsoft is currently adding AI to their Outlook and Office products. This technology will be everywhere very shortly, so it's essential to be ahead of the game, know what's coming, and figure out how to best use the technology in your business.

Prompt Engineering

Now that you’ve got a basic handle on AI tools and how they can fit into your business I want to introduce the idea of prompt engineering. This is a term you’ll hear increasingly in the next few years so it’s worth exploring.?

As you’ve seen, the way we interface with the new AIs is by chatting to them. Specifically we’re giving “prompts”. The AI works off the prompt to return the information it thinks we need.?

If we give the AI a crap prompt it will return crap information.?

Therefore the specificity, accuracy and context provided in the prompt are key. Imagine a new employee coming in on Monday and immediately you telling them “I need the report by Tuesday”.?

They will, unsurprisingly, be confused! They don’t know what the report is and even if they did they haven’t been given enough information abotu what the report needs, how to put it together and what you are expecting. Them failing to provide the report by Tuesday is?your?failing, not the new employees!

Yet we expect AIs to be different and to be able to perform with specificity, accuracy and context. Obviously they can’t!

Prompt engineering is the skill of being able to give the right prompt to an AI so that it returns the information we expect. We put in good instructions and the AI will return good results.?

Prompt engineering is a fast moving discipline and can get quite technical. So the best way to get a handle on it right now is to use repositories of good prompts.

Here’s a great example?https://ignacio-velasquez.notion.site/ignacio-velasquez/500-ChatGPT-Prompt-Templates-d9541e901b2b4e8f800e819bdc0256da

This resource is free but if you find it helpful please donate to the creator. It basically has a list of prompt templates you can use for a wide range of subjects and needs. Start by using these (and others from prompt template libraries online) and you’ll instinctively get a grasp on?how?best to structure your prompts.

Keeping Up to Date

One huge issue with using AI at the moment is the sheer speed at which everything is moving. I hesitated even to write this guide as I know specific details and recommendations will be out of date in a year or less. As a result I’ve kept it high level to mainly encourage you, as a business owner, to start experimenting with AI.?

To keep up to date on what’s going on in AI though you should subscribe to some newsletters. Newsletters are the right level of information frequency and depth to keep abreast of developments without getting too bogged down.?

Books are basically too slow. Discord communities are too fast. Newsletters sit in a nice sweet spot where you’ll get a summary of the big changes but won’t get drowned by minutiae.?

Here are a couple of recommendations:?

Ben’s Bites?

Bot Eat Brain?

Bagel Bots

The Rundown?

Here’s also a great LinkedIn resource they released to help people get up to date and orientated with what’s happening in AI:?100 free AI courses from LinkedIn

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this brief dip into AI for business has been sufficient to encourage you to go and try AI out. And once you’ve seen the potential of AI you’ll know how to extend its functionality and where to go and learn more. If that’s the case then this briefing has done its job.?

We’ll be doing more longer form pieces like this, once per week, in our Crushed Content newsletter. If you aren’t subscribed already hop over to CrushedContent.com to join 28,000+ other business owners who?get it delivered free to their inbox.?