What AI assistants can write for your small business
Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence (AI) is a growing part of modern life.
The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 was a significant milestone.
Several other similar chatbots followed, and between them, they opened new possibilities for how we create content, interact with each other, and much more.
What separated ChatGPT from the AI solutions before it was the way it could process and produce natural language.
Instead of feeling like you were prompting a robot and receiving a lifeless, parroted reply, conversations with ChatGPT and other chatbots sound more like talking to another person.
Among the many different applications for this technology, businesses have been exploring how having access to an AI chatbot can help them.
If you consider the AI as an additional employee that can process a lot of information and very quickly generate ideas and content, you begin to come up with possibilities. What’s more, these AI tools are far less expensive than an employee.
Of course, they have their limitations too, but they can take away repetitive jobs from employees that don’t require an in-person connection.
So in this article, we’ve looked at several ways small businesses can make use of AI chatbots to enhance their offering to customers.
Speedy content creation
One of the most common uses of ChatGPT and other AI chatbot tools is to quickly generate large amounts of content. These tools can write at incredible speeds compared to human writers.
They are particularly effective in generating outlines and ideas, since they will look at similar content out there and create something following that general trend.
This means they’ve become a favoured first step for writers, producing a rough draft that can then be refined.
A word of caution though. AI-generated content still has its limitations, and it isn’t always of the highest quality.
What’s more, Google has recently made changes to its search results that prioritises useful, well-written content. So simply churning out masses of ChatGPT articles is unlikely to help much from an SEO perspective.
Google wants you to create content that your readers find helpful and engage with. This means any AI-written content is likely to still require human refinement.
Writing strong prompts is a skill that needs practising as well. Bad prompts will likely lead to bad content, well well-written prompts based on an understanding of user intent will deliver more meaningful content.
Make sure you take the time to plan content ideas that your readers can make use of, and these AI tools will be of far more use than if you let them loose with only a vague idea.
It’s not just long-form content that you can generate either. Maybe your employees have stopped responding to the same old automated shift reminders. Creating some fresh new messages for these notifications might shake things up a little.
Gathering and summarising research
This new wave of chatbots excel at processing large amounts of information quickly. This gives them the ability to produce effective summaries of content that easily capture the main points.
Business owners and managers could use this capability to make concise user profiles, summarise new business opportunities, define their target market, and much more.
Keeping up to date with current trends can be a key part of running some businesses, particularly in the tech sector. Having chatbots able to summarise new advances can help identify opportunities for improvements within your business.
Suggesting new ideas
ChatGPT and other chatbots are great at suggesting new ideas, even if not all of them are good ideas! But they will generally take inspiration from other sources and find things to try far quicker than a human searching manually could do.
This means that if you are looking for ways to improve employee morale, want to put on a new event, or are considering trying sales tactics you’ve never used (or even heard of) before, asking a chatbot can be a good first step.
The more detailed you can be with your prompt, the better. So be clear about what you’re looking for and why. What is the aim of the ideas you want to generate? What’s your budget? What’s the setting they’ll be implemented in?
These chatbots are only as good as the inputs they receive, so take the time to try them out and hone your own prompt skills.
With time, you can come to use ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to deliver new value for your business.