I help entrepreneurs leapfrog over the typical potholes that derail most small businesses with inspiration, motivation, education, and support across a wide range of business topics drawn from over a decade of running my own business, teaching entrepreneurship for the City of New York, and coaching and consulting privately with dozens of women and minority small business owners. Honestly, why go it alone when help is an email away?
All in on AI?
Unless you’ve been living in an isolation tank, completely off the grid, or in a deep prolonged digital detox, there’s been no escape from all the chatter over the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) these past several months and, honestly, over the last couple of weeks in particular.
Amongst other things, ChatGPT recently announced its next iteration GPT-4, Google launched its AI chat, Bard, quickly followed by its AI app integration, and Microsoft launched its AI-augmented Bing search quickly followed by its own AI integration into Office and beyond.
It’s made me wonder if almost 40 years after the first Terminator movie hit theaters, we are soon to witness the inception of Skynet, the evil corporation responsible for the eventual domination of humanity by sentient cyborgs.
Ok, that’s the alarmist in me, here’s what the pragmatist has to say about all this.
Leveraging AI tools (and they are tools) is a smart strategy for entrepreneurs.
And, the sooner you dive in, the better off you’ll be.
Here are some of the best tips I’ve seen thus far on how to use AI in supporting small business owners:
- There’s a bit of an art to crafting good prompts that deliver valuable results. One of the best ones I’ve seen for chat and content AI tools is to a) approach your interaction as a conversation, and b) start by asking the AI if it can help you achieve a specific outcome.
For example, when I prompted ChatGPT with “Can you help me write an engaging LinkedIn post about how to leverage AI tools for solopreneurs,” it delivered a decent post complete with relevant hashtags.
Check out the post here (and feel free to comment).
- Another prompting tip is to give AI models to use, such as creating something ‘in the style of’ or ‘informed by’ specific resources. You’ll need to make sure you’re using an AI that is linked to the Internet for this, but it’s a really nice way to influence the output.
For example, when I asked Simplified.com’s AI presentation tool to “Create a presentation leveraging AI for solopreneurs in the style of a TEDTalk,” it produced 6 slides in less than 10 seconds.
Admittedly, the slides probably would have been significantly better if I'd given the AI an outline or article to draw from, but still it's pretty impressive.
- Use AI to expand your repertoire. The beautiful thing about a lot of these AI-enhanced tools is that they’re fairly easy to utilize and what they deliver can be as good (if not better) than what you’ve been doing with a lot more work and cost. This means that with a small learning curve you can produce a greater variety of resources, assets, tools, and more.
For example, I created a short video by asking ChatGPT to “write a video script for me on the return on investment of hiring a business coach for entrepreneurs.” Then, I went over to Pictory.ai, set up a free account, and spent a little time perfecting the AI generated video it produced from my script, complete with AI voice over.
Check out my video here. I’m kind of proud of it for a first effort.
Ok, so the cynic in me also wants to weigh-in with what it sees as a big, fat, cautious caveat—
Because AI draws its knowledge from the Internet and ongoing human usage, it is highly flawed, absolutely biased, and somewhat easily manipulated.
This means that you can’t trust AI to do it all for you. You still have to review, vet, correct, and control it.
I cannot underscore how critical this is.
I’m sure I’ll have more on this topic as I continue to experiment and learn.
In the meantime, if you’ve been using a nifty AI tool or hack and you’re in the sharing mood, please drop me a line and fill me in. I’d love to learn from you.
Until next week, in the immortal words of the Terminator, “Come with me if you want to live,” or at least if you want to thrive in these ever-evolving times.
"You not only transformed my website strategy, you tranformed my thinking on so many aspects of business, marketing and social media strategy. Thank you for being a true partner to me and for your amazing and supportive energy and vibe!" —Andrea Young, Founder, Sweet Vegan
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P.S. — Last week I finished out my series on Business Models with my best Price Advice.
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I help entrepreneurs leapfrog over the typical potholes that derail most small businesses with inspiration, motivation, education, and support across a wide range of business topics drawn from over a decade of running my own business, teaching entrepreneurship for the City of New York, and coaching and consulting privately with dozens of women and minority small business owners. Honestly, why go it alone when help is an email away?
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