You know you need to leverage AI in your business, but if you’re new to it, taking the first step can be scary.
Fortunately, there are many popular tools you can use to create new content, such as text and images. A few of the more well-known ones are chatGPT, Claude2, Google Bard, Perplexity, Midjourney, and Dall-E-3. These can be used in many areas of your small business, including sales, marketing, operations, finance, and C-level functions like business development. According to market research firm Statista, as of January 2023, only 12% of U.S. residents said they have used generative AI to generate text, so if you have, you're an early adopter.
To learn how small businesses can integrate generative AI like chatGPT into their daily operations, I recently spoke with Brett Ramberg, CEO of Ramberg Labs, an enterprise AI consulting firm in Loveland, Colorado.
Brett Ramberg teaches small business owners how to use AI to get better results.
Here are some ideas:
1. Research: Many small business owners You spend time every week on business development, and it takes time to research all your ideas and organize your findings. You can make the process easier by telling chatGPT or another tool to pull information from the internet. “You need to provide as much context as possible about the situation and the goal you're trying to achieve,” says Ramberg. “It's like telling a story about what you're doing and defining the problem.” Giving the tool an example of the desired outcome can also help.
2. Speed up your brainstorming: If you're looking to try a new marketing technique, generative AI can help you come up with ideas that you can customize. For example, say you run a leadership consulting firm targeting small businesses and want to engage your prospects with empathy-related ideas through a series of LinkedIn posts. You can ask the tool to generate post ideas to get an idea of what techniques you could use. If you want to strike the tone of a celebrity like Gary Vaynerchuk, you can add that to the prompt.
3. Increased Productivity: Once you've found an approach you like from your brainstorming, you can use some of the results of your brainstorming to speed up your work. For example, if a Gary V-style LinkedIn post resonates with you, you can cut and paste it into LinkedIn and edit it so that it feels natural to you. “It's really important to have a human in the loop,” Ramberg says. “It has to feel human.”
AI can also be used for editing: if the post it spits out is too long, you can use prompts like “Make this post 50% shorter” to save time.
4. Organize your documentation. Ramberg creates a lot of slide decks for work, and has found AI to be extremely useful for creating backgrounds: For example, you can upload a logo and ask a tool like chatGPT to create a slide around it.
5. Eliminate tasks you don't like to do. If you’re looking for ways to reduce repetitive or mundane tasks, generative AI tools can do the work for you, like crafting emails to let customers know you’ve received their orders, in the voice and tone of a business owner.
Ultimately, says Ramberg, “AI is an answer engine. It's a different way of thinking about knowledge. In a small business, you can never have too many answers or too much knowledge.”
