Like pretty much everyone else on LinkedIn, I've been playing with ChatGPT. What I've been trying to understand is whether or not it is of any practical use to small business owners. Not at some point in the future - right now.
My overall conclusion is that there is already real value on offer. As is the case for most things, the quality of the outputs are highly correlated to the quality of the inputs. Time needs to be invested in understanding how to refine prompts to generate high quality responses.
If you want to get to grips with how to fine tune your inputs, I highly recommend this course created by
Dave Birss
. It's easily digested, practical and thought provoking.
In the meantime, here are six ways that you might be able to use this interesting new tool to help you shape plans and implement the right processes to support growth.
- Brainstorming: One of the most significant benefits of ChatGPT is its ability to help generate new ideas. By asking the right questions and prompting you to think about your business in different ways, ChatGPT can help you come up with fresh, innovative ideas you might not have considered.
- Research: ChatGPT has access to a vast amount of information, and it can help you research different aspects of your business, such as your competition, target market, and industry trends. This research can be invaluable when creating plans and determining your business processes.
- Writing Assistance: ChatGPT can help you with the writing process, providing suggestions for wording and phrasing, as well as helping you to identify any areas where you might need to provide more detail or clarification.
- Strategic Planning: ChatGPT can help you create a strategic plan that outlines your long-term goals and objectives. It can help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, assess the opportunities and threats that your business faces, and develop a plan to achieve your goals.
- Process Development: Once you have a business plan in place, ChatGPT can help you develop the right processes to achieve your objectives. It can help you to identify the most efficient and effective way to carry out your business operations, and provide suggestions for streamlining your processes.
- Performance Tracking: ChatGPT (via an API connection) can help you track business performance by providing regular reports on your key performance indicators (KPIs). ChatGPT can even provide suggestions for improving your KPIs over time, helping you to achieve even better results.
In short, ChatGPT can be an incredibly valuable tool for small businesses, it's not just a gimmick. Caution is needed though, my experience to date has shown ChatGPT can be pretty flaky when it comes to factual information - you can get confident responses to questions that are very very wrong!
Was this piece written with the assistance of ChatGPT? Absolutely!
Author of The Sensible AI Manifesto | Check out my LinkedIn Learning courses
1 年Thanks for the mention, Chris! :-D
I think you can divide the opportunities (& risks) from AI into 3 categories * those that help you operate your business (which will be common to other small businesses, outside of tourism) * those that help retail / distribution of local experiences * those that help you operate experiences (e.g. AI tour guides / AI companions) Most are on the first step of the ladder. Some made it to the second step. I have been working on third step since 2018 ;)