It’s time to recruit robots
Putting artificial intelligence to work should help cut your costs
Could ChatGPT save your small business time and money? With some caveats, the answer is probably yes. While some of the hype around the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) is overblown, ChatGPT is a free resource that can help your business complete certain tasks more efficiently and productively. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a language model developed by the American technology group OpenAI. It uses naturallanguage processing tools to mine a huge universe of information with the aim of producing text that feels very human. This process is sometimes described as generative AI.
For small businesses, this offers all sorts of opportunities to automate work that you currently do manually. Most obviously, if your business has to create content of any type – from marketing emails to articles on your website – ChatGPT can do that almost instantly. Prompt it to create what you need, and it will generate results in just a few seconds. However, the uses of ChatGPT go well beyond content creation. For example, it can also serve as a powerful customer-engagement tool. You can incorporate the technology in your digital channels, including your website, in order to respond to customer queries, providing relevant information in a way that feels natural. That can support the customers’ experience and increase trust in your brand.
Similarly, ChatGPT can help you understand the preferences and behaviours of your customers. That might allow you to make product recommendations or offer promotions tailor-made for individual customers – and therefore help you to increase sales and revenues. The approach can be adjusted to encourage customers who are new to your website to make a purchase for the first time, and to persuade returning customers to shop again. Nor are the uses of ChatGPT only customer-facing. You can also use the technology to help with internal work. It’s a simple way to automate jobs such as data entry and order processing. That should free up people’s time to focus on tasks that create more value. ChatGPT will also help with your team’s research jobs and problem solving. It’s effectively a very powerful internet search engine; for certain types of question it can provide rapid answers.
Take time to experiment
Still, tread carefully – ChatGPT is not a silver bullet. For one thing, the technology takes time to get used to. Even for simple requests, you need to work out how to prompt ChatGPT in the right way to get the best possible results. You’ll need to devote some time to experimenting with the platform. More complex tasks, including using ChatGPT within your business’s website, will be more demanding, particularly if you have little technical knowledge.
You should also be wary of the results that ChatGPT delivers. It’s a great shortcut for content generation, but you’ll need to check what it produces. Is it accurate? Is it hitting the keywords and search engine optimisation metrics that will bring the audience your business needs? It makes sense to treat everything that ChatGPT generates as a first draft rather than the finished article; this can still save you a substantial amount of time. This is a technology that can genuinely help small firms level the playing field with their larger competitors. And since it’s free, at least for the basic version, you can play around with it to see what works without making any financial commitment.