Episode 86: Increasing Productivity with AI Tools: The Power of ChatGPT
Leveraging AI for Success: How ChatGPT Enhances Productivity in Business Operations
Welcome to a world where artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT have the potential to revolutionize productivity for service-based businesses. In this blog post, we'll explore how ChatGPT can streamline your processes, save you time, and unlock new possibilities for your business. Let's dive in and discover how AI can be your ally in boosting productivity and efficiency.
Understanding AI Tools and their Benefits
In this section, we'll discuss the definition of AI tools and highlight the key benefits of using ChatGPT in service-based businesses. From automating customer support to content generation and efficient scheduling, ChatGPT can enhance your operations, saving you valuable time and resources. By harnessing the power of AI, you can deliver prompt responses, maintain consistent messaging, and streamline administrative tasks.
Leveraging ChatGPT for Workflow Optimization
Now that we understand the benefits of ChatGPT, let's explore practical ways to integrate it into your daily business operations. We'll walk you through actionable use cases tailored to service-based businesses. Whether you want to automate repetitive tasks, generate personalized email responses and proposals, or conduct market research, ChatGPT has got you covered. Imagine the time and energy you'll save by automating routine interactions and gaining valuable insights at your fingertips.
Actionable Takeaways for Service-Based Businesses:
In this final section, we'll provide you with three actionable takeaways that you can implement right away to unlock the full potential of ChatGPT:
Identify and prioritize tasks that can benefit from AI automation: Evaluate your business processes and identify areas where ChatGPT or other AI tools can bring efficiency and time savings. Start with tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming, or prone to human error.
Leverage ChatGPT effectively for optimal results: To get the most out of ChatGPT, provide clear instructions and context to ensure accurate responses. Consider training the model with industry-related knowledge to enhance its understanding of your specific domain. Continuously refine and improve the AI-generated content based on user feedback and outcomes.
Stay informed and adapt to evolving AI technologies: AI is constantly evolving, and new tools and advancements are emerging regularly. Stay updated with industry trends, attend webinars, and explore other AI tools that can further enhance productivity in your business.
Conclusion:
By embracing AI tools like ChatGPT, service-based business owners can unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency. These tools are not here to replace human capabilities but to augment and assist, allowing you to focus on high-value activities and deliver exceptional service to your clients. Take the first step today and explore how ChatGPT can transform your business. It's time to unleash the power of AI and take your productivity to new heights.
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Podcast Transcript:
Kiva Slade 0:01
Welcome to Collab with Kiva, where we let our inner nerd geek out on all the non sexy parts of your business. I'm talking data and operations. Neither as flashy or glamorous, but both are foundational to your business growth. I'm your host, Kiva Slade, your strategy and analytics guide here to break down what feels complicated. So it is understandable, and executional. Let's dive in. Hey, hey, welcome to another episode of Collab with Kiva. I am your host, Kiva Slade, and today, we are going to dive into one of my favorite topics related to tech, it's ChatGPT. But it's really about increasing productivity with AI tools, we're going to primarily focus on chatGPT, because that's the thing that's most available to most people in the public realm. However, we're not going to just stay there.
Kiva Slade 1:03
So with this particular episode, we really want to dive into again, that world of AI tools, and explore how they can revolutionize productivity, especially for service based businesses. For those that are solopreneurs. With those that have small teams, you may not have enough people, or money to do the things that you want to do that you know, you need to do in your business on a consistent basis. And so with that being the case, we're going to look at, obviously, the power of ChatGPT. But also just how AI tools can help you streamline things in terms of your processes that can save you time and possibly unlock some new business possibilities for you. So let's go ahead and dive in. And the first part is really understanding AI tools and their benefits. So before we start, let's make some definitions. It's always good that we're on the same page. So artificial intelligence, AI tools are software applications that leverage advanced algorithms to mimic human intelligence and perform tasks with speed and accuracy. One such tool is ChatGPT, I think it's key to point out that these advanced algorithms, LLM is large language models. They're designed to mimic human intelligence, perform tasks with speed and accuracy. But they are not a replacement for human.
Kiva Slade 2:37
So let's just go ahead and say that, are there areas in which they can replace humans in some of lower level task? Absolutely. So as a service based business owner, if you're using tools like ChatGPT, why? Obviously for some of us, we feel the benefits are immense. And I say some of us because few research study recently suggested that 58% of Americans have heard of ChatGPT. However, only 14% had actually used it. Stats for Bard, you know, I think around 7% usage. So even though it might feel like you're just like in this preponderance of people talking about these things, people talking about them, and people actually using them are two different things. So you might have talked about it in your business, but are you actually using it in your business? And there's definitely a difference between those two things. So as we're thinking about this as service based business owners, I think it's important to come to it with a really open mind. I'll admit, I've always been an early adopter of tech so that could explain some of my excitement and my enthusiasm versus those who might be late adopters or mid term adopters. The reality of the situation though, is that the opening up of these large language models to the public whether through ChatGPT, Grammarly. Microsoft Bing is allowing these things in. We are in a place. I don't think we've ever been in and I don't know if we ever will be where these technological advances are happening at such a rapid rate and the proliferation of them. It's like drinking from a firehose and a sense of the sheer magnitude of apps that are being created that are built off of these large language All these AI tools.
Kiva Slade 5:02
Just recently Google has announced I'm not Google, I'm sorry, Amazon, they are putting like $100 million initiative to help people think about how these tools can enhance what we're doing. I recently was reading impromptu book by Reed Hoffman, who co founded LinkedIn. He is also a venture capitalist, and has invested in open AI, the makers of ChatGPT. And the book obviously is written with AI in terms of ChatGPT. But what's amazing is the different usages beyond what some of us might use it for. He really engages in conversations around its use for Journalism, law, criminal justice, so many different areas and use cases that, again, we're at a place where this is so new, and so unbridled at this point, that the possibilities truly are endless. It's all about our use of it, our interaction with it, and how we decide to use it. So again, the benefits can be immense, like huge, ginormous, gigantic, all of those kinds of adjectives. So think about things like I've shared previously, how to create like an SOP using ChatGPT. From a video, maybe you have repeated questions that you get. So customer servers, like you can literally automate some of your customer service, like frequently asked questions. And if we're honest, we all engage in this already. If you go on to some help, you're going to get a chat bot, who's going to ask you some initial questions before you can like get through the gatekeeper and get to an actual person. But those are things that again, if it's a kind of frequently asked question, that's the same all the time, the answer is the same all the time. Why not give it to the person faster, and save that human time for those questions, those problems, customer support needs, that are greater than here's the answer to this question that we get a gazillion times. I mean, we could back this up further. Like adjusting whatever it is that your business does, so that you don't get this question, but that's a whole nother conversation.
Kiva Slade 7:47
So it can allow you to basically provide instant responses to common questions, common inquiries without the need for that human intervention. Again, saving that human intervention. That's human time for tasks that are more complicated for tasks that require higher levels of reasoning for tasks that require humans basically. So it really does save you time, and it can help you ensure that your customers are receiving prompt assistance, which is really important. I can also obviously people are using it for content generation and copywriting. Grammarly has added it in to help you with your emails, as if them underlining certain things enough was wasn't enough. So having a writing assistant that can help you draft a blog post or social media caption or even an email newsletter, or you take what you utilize and have written and you put it in there to help it get improved. All of those are possibilities. In the impromptu Reed Hoffman book, he talks with this professor who escapes me right now, but he's a professor at a school in Texas, I believe it is a university. And he's an older Gent. And he was excited though about ChatGPT. And he actually started making his students use it. But think about some of the things that teachers do on a regular basis. And another teacher that he spoke to was talking about using it to gauge like, the sentence structure of an essay. And if you think about how many essays teachers have to read, and how many things that they have to do, like this can really be your use case where it is objective, and it's like examining sentence structure and coming out with whatever the the scale that it was told to to measure this sentence structure but I love that this older professor who like he thought his his students were like Oh my gosh, he's making us useless. But he was excited about it and he, you literally had to share your queries with it with him in order for him to see how you interacted with the tool.
Kiva Slade 10:13
But the reality is, I love that. Because if we think about it, for those of us who have gone on to higher education and things of that sort, most of the time, what we're learning is behind what is actually taking place in the world, in very few cases are their true real life. Right now, in this moment, things that are happening after you kids in college, one of them is like, he totally hates it. And he's a writer, he loves to write and get his thoughts out. And he's like, yeah, people are using it for this case, that case, and he just hasn't really interacted with it in a way that he has been able to see benefits. However, for this professor to like, make it part of a course, I think that needs to happen, because the reality is, again, back to that 58% 14%. This is here. So you can be the stick in the mud, not wanting to utilize it, or you can embrace it and figure out, how can it help me be more productive? How can it help me, you know, kind of take care of lower level tasks, so that I'm actually using my energy for things that only I can do. So again, you can use it as a writing assistant, help you boost your content creation. You know, have your messaging be consistent across various platforms for many small business owners, the level of marketing that you have to do, sometimes astounds people and also stumps them. And it's very frustrating, as you're serving clients to also think through this level of marketing.
Kiva Slade 10:13
So can this be a tool that you could possibly use to help you with that? Definitely, could you use it maybe to help you determine who's kind of top 10 kind of businesses that would benefit from your service, maybe it's an email newsletter, nurture sequence. I've trained mine and one of my conversations to using a plugin to memorize my services. So whenever I say Kiva Services, it knows exactly what I'm talking about. And it will generate information based on that. So you again, this is about training it. And you can train it in those conversations to give you the certain output that you're looking for. And another way that you can use it is like scheduling and appointment management, like Yeah, we all have those Calendly and so many other things. But it can help you if you're not using some of those online based schedulers to really think through and give yourself reminders because even with my reminders on my calendar, and sometimes via ALEXA. Who I have to spell otherwise she will join this podcast. You know, it's like I can forget things and so to have automatic reminders, and to me, totally would love it totally love reminders into clients as well. So that, again, we're freeing up parts of our time, that are truly all of our time is valuable, but being able to free up time to focus on more strategic aspects of our business, completely a win win situation.
Kiva Slade 13:42
So speaking of that, though, le t's talk about how you can really use it to optimize some of your workflows. Because we can understand obviously, what it does is AI in things of that sort, but automate repetitive tasks and increase you know, think about some of the things that are happening all the time in your business, you can set up automated responses that handle these routine interactions freeing you up for time. Zapier has ChatGPT plugin. And I don't know if you get Zapier newsletter, but it's chock full of great things on other ways that you can also automate. And when I say automate, I don't necessarily mean just like things that are happening through ChatGPT But Zapier, Integromat. All of these things exist. So that again, we can have some things that are automated and not having to have a human touch involved in them. Recently, I had a strategy session with a new client, and the level of her business focuses on automation, with a level of automation in her business. It's like mind blowing, it just really is like, Whoa, that is so fancy schmancy but it's so helpful. These tools are out there. And there's a lot of us is carrying heavy mental loads of these small little tasks, small little niggling tasks that are just like they're, and they're there and they're there and they never want to go away, you can start using ChatGPT and automation to close out those tabs in your brain again. So you are freeing yourself up to work on things that are more strategic and work or work on things that need you fully present.
Kiva Slade 15:25
So we've talked about generating personal email. So you can also use it to help you respond to your proposals. Again, like in that section, the chat that I have, where it's memorized my services, the amount of things I ask it based on that, and what it gives me back, it's glorious. So really think about how you can utilize it in that way. By training it to know what kind of voice you want it to respond in, to know anything that's kind of about you that you want it to show up as in terms of your business, you can use it to analyze customer data. I am of course, always advocate for making things anonymous as much as you can. So like cleaning your data is really important. So that there's nothing because what you give ChatGPT does become part of what it's learned. So obviously nothing that's proprietary, obviously nothing that is identifiable. So you want to think through ways that you can do that. And I think that that's obviously that goes to say with pretty much anything that we're doing nowadays of technology. So really thinking through that. So like you can also use it like conducting that market research. And it can help you with things like that. I don't know of how many people have used like ask the public, does it answer the public think it's answer the public? Yeah. But like it can generate questions like if you go there generates questions, if you don't pay for it, you can only generate a few questions. But like, you know, thinking about your services, what are questions that people would ask about your services that can be used for you to create content, that is answering people's questions that they would have about your services.
Kiva Slade 17:17
So really understanding how we can interact with it, and pull out or extract what we need in order to determine some information trends for forward movement that we might need to take. So there's definitely additional plugins that I would encourage people to look into, obviously, what I'm saying today deals with the paid version ChatGPT Plus, because nobody has time for it's not available right now. So $20, in math, it's a business write off, write it off. So it's definitely the things that I'm talking about are related to that. There's some other tools out there. And, you know, again, we are being bombarded with AI. There's Synthesia, which will make videos for you, I hear from people all the time, I don't want to be on video, oh, you can create a script. And you can have AI generated videos that can talk about your business and what you do, how you serve people.
Kiva Slade 18:28
Adobe, like there's just so so many and so so many that are coming on a regular basis, as this technology just continues to evolve, and people continue to think of different ways in which to utilize that. So I encourage you to look into that to to dig a little deeper. I love the plug in link reader. Because as most of you know, ChatGPT was trained up to 20 data available to 2021. However, Link reader allows it to read a page. And that's what I did with the services. One is like read this website, and there's chat with PDF, which will, it can go in and read and pull out things from a PDF document that you have. You can put things in tables. There's a Chrome extension. I don't remember what it's called. But it literally you can then copy it and take that table from ChatGPT and put it right into a Google Sheet. Which is so super helpful. I mean, literally, there's so so much that's coming and that's already here. And my goal is to really encourage you to use this technology. Many people that I speak with are small business owners, micro business owners in many instances, and with that being the case, it's this constant feeling of being on that hamster wheel. That's exhausting and burnout is real. So how can you utilize these tools in which to stave off burnout, and also get you to the goals that you're looking for. So this is a taste of things that you can do. There's so much though that's out there, and so much in terms of learning how to prompt the tool in order to get out what you want. Because if your prompt is pedestrian, you're gonna get out pedestrian output. So there's paid services out there with good prompts. AI PRM is a really good one that has verified prompts. It can even analyze your QuickBooks data. I kid you not.
Kiva Slade 20:55
So the possibilities truly are endless, and they're changing on a daily basis. I want you to be active in your business, in being aware of what's out there and aware of how they can help you do more of what it is that you do, in terms of helping serving others, and not getting yourself caught up in the small tasks that are part of the day to day running of a business. So let's close out thinking about some takeaways. Number one, literally go through your business, like identify and prioritize tasks that can benefit from automation, again, through whatever level of AI or whatever you want to use, I think there's doing a time study of yourself and your team, it really does help you focus on what needs to be, in some cases, deprioritized from you, the owner, down to your team. And also what can be put in place that serves as a level of automation or utilizing AI in that process. So really evaluating your business processes to help identify where ChatGPT or other AI tools can bring you efficiencies, and time savings, again, your time is valuable, and you want it freed up for those higher level tasks. So think about things that are repetitive in your business that are time consuming, that are prone to human error, and start making a list of what those things are.
Kiva Slade 22:33
Number two, leverage ChatGPT effectively like for optimal results, I hear people like share things are they, Oh, I asked it blah, blah, blah, and it said, blah, blah, blah, well, if you're using the free version 3.5 is probably is going to give you some blah, blah, blah, using for gives you a deeper answer because it has better reasoning put into place. There's another large language model clause that's out there that is trained on even more tokens than ChatGPT is and so utilizing it can yield far different results. You can utilize Python coding to get out things. So again, your level of leveraging is going to highly depend on your level of expertise. So we'll learning how to craft a prompt. Which again, if you utilize some pre paid services, like AI PRM, you can start to see what goes into a good prompt. If your prompt is one or two lines, I can almost guarantee you if it's not a follow up to an inquiry, it's not a good prompt. Most prompts are a good paragraph for you for you to give the tool, the information that it needs to give you the outcome that you're looking for. So providing clear instructions and context and in things that needed to be added in helps ensure more accurate responses. Does that mean that the tool if it's ChatGPT is not going to hallucinate one day or two on some of your prompts Most definitely. Again, this is why we need humans still. And this isn't about replacing humans. This is about getting things started so that we're not the one staring at the blank page that we have a little something to work with, it's often a lot easier to edit than it is to just start from basic scratch.
Kiva Slade 24:26
So consider like training the model in your industry related knowledge, like to help it understand better what you do. You know, continuously refine if you have a prompt that like works really good. Save that sucker. Put it into a file somewhere so that you have access to it. The name your chat conversations with it so that you're again, it's about that training. So when my one that I've trained it on my services, everything that I've asked it is related again, back to those services. A general questions is related to general questions, podcast stuff was related to podcast stuff, like you want to keep those conversations together because again, it's going to go back through how you've interacted with it. If you just like starting a whole bunch of new conversations all the time, then it's really gonna get confusing and fill a lot of messy to you, which might feel overwhelming. So with that being the case, you know, think about how you interact with it and improve your knowledge of that.
Kiva Slade 25:34
And the third takeaway is really just stay informed and adapt more to these evolving technologies. A part of our growth and development is professional development, understanding new tools and advancements and how they're emerging and how you can better utilize them. Whether it's staying updated with industry trends, attending webinars, exploring or tools can do setting aside a few hours a week to just allow yourself to play in a playground that is AI at this point. Like it helps your future productivity, it enhances that. And it also opens your mind up to different ideas, and ways that you can utilize this technology in your own business. So I really want you to explore the power of ChatGPT, I don't want you hanging out in that 50% tile where you're like I know about it, but not in that 14% that's actually using it in their business on a daily basis. So leverage these tools. streamline your processes, save yourself time, unlock possible new growth opportunities for you and your business. And again, remembering that these tools exists to augment and assist. All right, they're not to replace human capabilities. And augmenting and assisting is super helpful. And if you can get something like a done faster, which saves you time and money in your business, let it augment and assist you.
Kiva Slade 27:22
Alright, so you want to leverage these tools effectively. embrace their possibilities. Find ways to integrate them into your business that like aligns with your goals, your needs for your business. So I hope that this is helpful. Thank you for tuning in to this episode. Don't forget to Subscribe, stay connected. And I'd love to know how are you using this in your business? Let me know. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Collab with Kiva. I'm wildly cheering you on as you go forth and execute data and operational efficiencies in your business. If you need additional support, connect with me via my website, the516collaborative.com your reviews on Apple are appreciated. See you next week.
Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.
Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.