The main thing I’ve learned about ChatGPT is that it requires a lot of preparation to use correctly. You have to actually know what you want. There are a lot of fun and goofy things it can do. When you get to the brass tax of using it as a helper, it still requires you to drive the ship. While you can likely learn some expertise while using the tool, it takes expertise to understand when AI lies to you.
I spent the better part of today answering questions for ChatGPT. The mission was to create a stronger pitch focused on presenting value to prospective restaurants I’d like to sell. Now I’ve written a few times about the theory of using ChatGPT, that was a way to focus my mind. It’s time to get into using it for real.
As I continue to learn I want to contextualize why you’d want to add generative AI to your workflow. A lot of the people I talk to in my regular life can see the benefit of AI tools. They struggle to connect the benefits of AI directly with the work they face in their life.
Today I’d like to give a couple of ways to think about generative AI tools so that you can start to picture your own use cases.
Generative AI tools could become the new search engine
We have gotten used to the “Google it” philosophy of internet browsing. You leverage the AI that drives Google and it returns web results for your search. Either the Google snippet answers your question or you have to click to individual sites, consuming information.
Sometimes the answers you are looking for aren’t found so you filter your searches to sites like Reddit and YouTube. Inevitably you find what you are looking for or start over with a new search term.
Now what if there was a tool you could talk to that would summarize available information for you. One you could ask questions directly and it would answer you. You wouldn’t need to go to any other sites, you just get your answers. Complete recipes to bake a cake without the corny blog part will just appear. You'll get back a list of specific questions/talking points that need to be answered in full to draft up a contract or a proposal.
While there are limitations today with using ChatGPT to browse the web, there are apps that can search the internet a lot better. This is also technology that is being improved month to month in real time. It is entirely possible that instead of Googling, you go to a tool like ChatGPT and ask it questions.
Given the GPTs can be trained to remember specific information, you can really search with a lot of specific lenses/skill sets. You can be the marketer, graphic designer and SEO consultant all at once. I exaggerate, but with enough knowledge that is literally possible.
Also how is SEO going to work with a search engine free world. So much new.
ChatGPT can be the expert business partner that cares about your project
Today, with the help of ChatGPT, I wrote 2000 words describing the promo page I work for. To be clearer, I wrote the content based on prompts it gave me. I said, ChatGPT, what information do you need from me to help me sell better?
It took me a few hours and covered everything from what our content strategy is to challenges we face. Overall, I can feed this to ChatGPT over and over again and it will be able to make sure the answers it gives are relevant to our brand.
Going through the process of preparing relevant information to prime a tool like ChatGPT will force you to think about your projects with more detail. The best practice is to save all of your answers. You can use them as templates to save you time in the future. It’s a good practice to have ChatGPT summarize the information you provide so you can make sure it actually understands.
As an example, it got confused when I explained the pricing model. I needed to ask it to include certain packages it felt didn’t need to be there. However, it summarized what I wrote with 98% accuracy.
I then asked it what information it would need to target a specific restaurant. It took me a solid 90 minutes to do the research required to list out another 1444 words of information. When I fed that to ChatGPT I was ready to actually use it. Keep in mind, I only need to do the restaurant specific part next time.
ChatGPT then gave me back a well-written proposal I could use in an email template. I then asked for a pitch deck and it outlined 10 very strong slides. It couldn’t make that PPT for me, but I am sure there are tools that can. It took less than 2 minutes to generate that proposal and slideshow outline for me.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever converted 3500 words of information into 10 slides, but it usually takes a little more than 2 minutes. The main takeaway is that a little bit of intentional prep work leads to a lot of saved time later on.
AI can also analyze data for you
Another project I’m working on is to compile actual factual social media data. I am sure there is a way to automate this process, but when you do a competitive analysis, you should pay attention to what you are documenting. Looking at 500 Instagram posts and writing down performance metrics is going to make you more of an expert than only looking at a summary after. Remember expertise plus AI beats only AI.
Once you’ve done that foundational work, you can look at AI generated summaries of your data and it will instantly mean more. You can definitely create pivot tables and use filter tools to parse your data to make it more meaningful. You can also ask the AI tool to do it for you and spend more time analyzing than compiling.
Because you did all the hard work of learning what the data you fed to the AI tool means, the results will speak to you. When they point out how one type of food outperforms others, you’ll start to see flashes of that kind of content in your head. In this way AI will help you make smarter and wiser choices. A lot of the future will be chatting with a robot about your data. It sounds a lot nicer than the copy/paste hell I’ve been through.
I framed this section like this because I think people oversell the danger of AI on the job market. AI is going to make people who know how to do their jobs well, do them better. AI is not going to just replace human capital. Bad hiring managers hiring unnecessary employees will keep happening regardless of industry. Hiring, layoffs and firing are a part of stock price manipulation.
Technology isn’t going to stop people from getting hired. It is going to replace really boring jobs no one wanted to do. Data analysis is fine, but creating dashboards takes ages. If technology can replace 15 hours of boring work, so be it. We can use the rest of that time to have more meetings. In those meetings AI can even solve some debates for us.
Overall I wanted to try to contextualize how you can use a tool like ChatGPT in your life. I hope this helps.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
Comments