Workers and business owners are leaning into Generative AI. Here’s how.

(This column originally appeared in The Inquirer)

In a recent Cox Business survey of small business owners and employees, a third said they invested in AI in 2023, and more than half plan to invest even more this year.

Most of these investments are in Generative AI tools, with the most popular being ChatGPT (other popular tools include Google Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Bing/Copilot). These tools, which are becoming smarter and faster, use large language models trained to understand information from many different sources to assist workers in daily tasks, enabling them to be more productive.

Here are five ways local professionals are using Generative AI tools:

1. Selling your product

Michelle Wirtz sells vintage crafts and other artwork from her marketplace booth in Quakertown, Red Brick Cottage Co., and online.

“I use ChatGPT to better describe the items that I sell on eBay and Etsy and on social media,” she said. “I feel ChatGPT also knows a little about the item by my title, so it will add a few things that I may not have known about my vintage items.”

Wirtz is careful to validate what ChatGPT suggests to make sure it’s accurate and, according to her, “it usually is.”

2. Shaping — and reshaping — your business

Downingtown-based author, speaker, and business strategist Aaron Proietti has written extensively on Generative AI and admits to having “long and meandering” conversations with ChatGPT.

He’s been able to use the tool for business advice, asking it for strategies and doing SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. He says that Generative AI can act as a team of collaborative partners with the expertise of any human he would work with — as long as he asks the right questions.

“Asking ChatGPT for an idea to improve my business is not likely to yield anything particularly insightful, but if I experiment in providing new contexts, then insight can be found,” he said. “For instance, if I ask ChatGPT how Starbucks or Disney might improve my business, the creativity is unlocked.”

3. Increasing your productivity

For Dan Hughes, the cofounder of Doylestown technology consulting firm Claritee.AI, Generative AI tools are an important part of the consulting and technology services his company provides to their clients. His team uses generative AI daily to help create and build proposals, write blogs, design training material, prepare legal documents, and even write code.

“It has significantly increased our productivity,” he said.

4. Honing your message

Kim Porter, the executive director of Be a Part of the Conversation, an Ardmore-based nonprofit that helps families with substance use, addiction, and related health issues, has used ChatGPT to create language about their nonprofit organization that will be relatable to the general public.

“We are sometimes so entrenched in our subject matter that it can be challenging to objectively relay information that might be overwhelming to a layperson,” she said. “When prompting ChatGPT, I include a request to avoid jargon.”

Proietti agrees.

“I find it’s most useful in helping me develop high-level structure for my writing, as well as giving me alternative phrasing and new ideas to sprinkle in,” he said. “It can edit my writing. It can make suggestions for improving clarity. And it can help me adjust the tone of my writing.”

5. Researching new topics

Generative AI also has plenty of uses for professionals and students in higher education.

For example, Matthew Brook O’Donnell, a lecturer and research fellow at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, uses the technology “as often as possible” to draft e-mails, or expand on a set of bullet points or concepts to be included in a presentation. He believes that generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be an essential tool for his students.

“If you are trying to learn about new developments or a specific topic, point the LLM to an overview article or Wikipedia page and ask for a structured summary of the fundamentals, and so on,” he said. “I encourage my students to do exactly the same thing and to commit time to trying out different tools and different ways to prompt them.”

Hannah Joseph, who works as a research assistant at Temple University’s Integrative Ecology Lab, has used ChatGPT to help her undergraduate research.

“I had the opportunity to create a ‘ChatGPT for Spotted Lanternfly Research’ called Spotted Lanternfly GPT (SLF-GPT), where we included peer-reviewed articles, management protocols, and other educational resources about this invasive species that was first detected in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 2014,” she said. “We are training the model on knowledge about spotted lantern flies so that communities can use it to learn more about this invasive species and help reduce its spread.”

Personally, I like to use ChatGPT and Google Gemini to help me research topics for the articles I write and create documents for my company, like an ethics or paid time off policy. I also like to tinker with prompts provided by GoDaddy and OpenAI to help me come up with business ideas, analyze my website’s search engine optimization, and suggest ways to improve my cash flow.

It’s important to remember that Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are far from perfect. They can perform lots of tasks in a much quicker time than humans, but that doesn’t mean that the results are completely accurate. Be careful not to entirely rely on its results and to have experts review its output before putting it into practice. That aside, don’t ignore this technology. It’s only going to get better and will ultimately play a significant role in the operations of both your business and personal life.

“Overall, my experience with ChatGPT has benefited both my academic and professional endeavors,” Joseph said. “It is a great resource to use.”