We know that the world moves FAST for small businesses – as a small business ourselves, we get it! It can feel challenging to keep up with the latest business trends and marketing strategies in your busy life as a business owner, entrepreneur, and community leader, and the speed at which Artificial Intelligence is moving in 2023 takes things to a whole new level.
We’re here to help you stay ahead of this fast-moving technology that’s shaking up industries around the globe. In a recent episode of Expert Connexions, our founder and Principal Strategist Julie Holton sat down with Jesse Flores, Chief Web Pro at Super Web Pros, to explore developments, challenges, and what the future holds for AI and small businesses.
The first thing everyone needs to know?
Artificial Intelligence is not magic.
At a fundamental level, AI is simply a system of large statistical models mining an incredible amount of data, all aimed at generating different kinds of output to solve specific problems.
Take one example you’ve likely heard of recently: ChatGPT. What is it, really?
ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT-3.5 architecture. As a language model, ChatGPT is capable of generating human-like responses to a wide range of prompts and questions, making it a valuable tool for natural language processing and machine-learning applications. Trained on an extensive corpus of text data, ChatGPT has a vast knowledge base and can provide accurate and informative responses on a variety of topics. Whether it’s answering questions, generating creative writing, or engaging in conversation, ChatGPT is a versatile and powerful language model that can help businesses and individuals alike.
Or at least – that’s ChatGPT’s own definition of itself!
You guessed it: that paragraph was written using ChatGPT. (We promise, it’s all human from here on out!). While that summary might be technically accurate, it’s not exactly the most interesting or engaging way to describe this innovative tool. We prefer to say it like this:
ChatGPT is a natural language model that feels (almost) real. You can ask it questions, direct it to write a paragraph, generate an email, transcribe content, or suggest taglines and hashtags – among many other things! (However, we don’t suggest asking it to write your college essay). Because ChatGPT was trained on an immense volume of text, it knows a lot – but it doesn’t know everything. Specifically, ChatGPT was trained on content that only goes up to 2021, so it doesn’t have access to information after that period. ChatGPT can help streamline and automate tasks that don’t require a human touch, and when used thoughtfully, it’s a great tool for almost any business.
What’s so exciting right now is the availability, the fact that it’s starting to become mainstream for users, and the fact that these things are starting to feel really human. In the last month alone, data showed that there were over a million new users for ChatGPT in 30 days. Even compared to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or any other platform in the world, it is the fastest-growing platform ever!
So how is AI changing the game when it comes to productivity?
The biggest advantage of using AI for your business? Speed! As Jesse Flores shared in this great example, these automation tools have the power to give us time back in our day.
“Here’s what I would have done with an hour-long meeting transcript before a tool like ChatGPT existed. I would have sent the transcript to the admin and asked him or her to create a summary of the meeting notes and any tasks that we need to accomplish. The admin might spend 20 minutes going through the transcript, another 10 or 15 minutes coming up with the notes, and another 10 or 15 minutes entering all that into the system.
Instead, I feed the transcript into ChatGPT, and the summary and action items are generated in less than a minute. I can just give my admin the output and ask for it to be put into the system and assigned to the right people. And so that one hour of time has been shrunk into two minutes of management, and then the 15 minutes it takes to put it into our system. We just saved ourselves 45 minutes’ worth of labor by using this tool. Now, compound that by every single meeting. That’s real part-time labor FTEs worth of labor just in this one task.”
We don’t know a single business owner that couldn’t use more time in the day!
Although we can’t give you more time, our team is here to help you navigate the world of AI, and determine the best AI tools to work for your business – and how you can implement them most effectively. Just think of us as Chat-mC!
For even more in-depth insight from Julie and Jesse on understanding AI basics, be sure to watch the full Expert Connexions episode:
If you’re ready to get started with AI, or just want to learn more, reach out to us today. We’re committed to keeping you on the cutting edge of technology, and there’s never been a better time to start than right now.