If you’re not incorporating artificial intelligence into your work in some way, you’re behind the curve. Even the most suspicious and non-technical entrepreneurs could save time and money making use of the tools available, let alone those thinking bigger with AI and creating their own.
3 ways ambitious entrepreneurs are using AI
I asked entrepreneurs across all industries about how they were using AI tools in their business and their responses fit into three categories:
Content assistance
If your business relies on content in any way, AI could be the copilot you were looking for. Down one end of the AI content spectrum is getting assistance with headlines and ideas, up the other is entrusting AI with more complicated tasks and writing entire documents. These entrepreneurs are getting support with the planning and prep, to create more room for creativity.
Steve Vickers from Routes North is using AI to help streamline the process of commissioning new articles, using ChatGPT to “create highly detailed content briefs for the team of writers creating our Scandinavia travel guide. The tool has helped me by suggesting dozens of ideas that we haven’t covered before.” Vickers recommends that entrepreneurs, “feed ChatGPT with a few of your existing articles, so it gets a feel for your tone of voice and writing style. Then go ahead and ask it to create a new brief. You can even ask it to format an article outline it in a simple, user-friendly way so that your writers are totally clear about what to submit.” Use existing content to create a brief for future content to save time instructing freelancers.
In a similar fashion, Alex Goldberg from product comparison site Fin vs Fin is using Chat GPT to surface new writing opportunities for SEO, including to “identify new topic clusters, products to review, and generally streamline content creation,” he said. “It has helped me move from keyword idea to published article much faster, including saving time generating new ideas for articles and helping with content brief creation so that my editorial team can expand on each topic.” Goldberg recommends you, “start asking ChatGPT to generate all the boilerplate information, then let humans repackage their words content that’s truly helpful to the reader, being careful to add original thought too!”
Laura Rowe from Align Lifestyle is using AI to improve her time management so she can better meet the needs of her clients. “I’m using ChatGPT to assist me in developing bespoke growth and personal development plans to support my clients with their mindset and mental wellness, so they can improve their mental and physical health as soon as possible after consultation,” she said. “This has helped me create more balance in my working day, take on more clients and increase revenue.” Rowe recommends that entrepreneurs, “ask ChatGPT to pretend to be an expert in a chosen field, when giving commands,” adding that, “when you ask it to take on a specific role the results are so much more in depth and usable.”
Content creation
The next entrepreneurs are testing the limits of what they can outsource to our robot counterparts. Once the writing is done, they use a multitude of tools to do more with the same material. This can then be populated in multiple areas using far less time and energy.
Aysegul Sanford from Foolproof Living is using Notion AI and Jasper to generate short blurbs for engaging social media posts for multiple platforms. “These tools help me write several catchy social media posts within minutes, which then I can easily schedule on different platforms in the upcoming months,” she said. “I can now create and schedule content in a fraction of the time, and as a result, I eliminated the need to hire another person.” Sanford recommends that entrepreneurs, “play around with multiple AI tools and be patient as you create your own workflow.”
Speaker and coach Willo Sana is also turning content into social media posts with the help of AI, using ChatGPT to extract key insights from her upcoming book, Double Down on Your Genius. “It’s pulling out the best quotes from each chapter and writing a caption to accompany each one,” she said. “This has helped me create hundreds of ready-to-publish social posts in mere minutes!” Echoing Sanford’s advice, Sana recommends that you start playing, “even just to learn different prompts and see what they can do. I’ve been working on teaching it my writing style, and while it doesn’t always hit the mark, it’s gotten way better than when I started.”
Kalyan Ray-Mazumder from Prepmedians is going beyond the words, using Midjourney to enhance social media marketing posts by “creating beautiful and resonant images” that he displays “as green screen backgrounds using a TikTok filter inside the app’s editing software,” he said, “This process has helped me increase audience watch times, thereby fueling the algorithms to increase impressions of the post, all without having to hire artists or use dreadful stock photography.” Ray-Mazumder invites entrepreneurs to experiment with Midjourney to create images that are cohesive with their brand assets and elevate their social media presence.
3 ways ambitious entrepreneurs are using AI
Research and analytics
Artificial intelligence tools have far wider application than simply planning and creating content. Used in the right way, they can save time researching and analyzing, creating more space to do something with the data. Long gone are trawling through articles, manual data entry and complicated excel formulae. Instead, these entrepreneurs are having crucial information delivered to them in a few clicks.
Harry Morton from Lower Street, for example, is using AI to stay updated with industry news in under five minutes per day. “I have configured Zapier and Open AI to find the top news sources in our market and summarize articles into simple bullet lists, sent as an automated daily digest,” he said. “Instead of scrolling through newsletters and newsfeeds every morning, I have a single email that I can read in minutes. Then I can dig deeper into the stories that matter to my business.” Morton recommends that entrepreneurs, “Consider all the sources of information you regularly parse and leverage no-code AI tools to make you a more efficient and productive entrepreneur.”
Will Green from Poem Analysis is also becoming a more efficient and productive entrepreneur, using various AI tools for market research. “Between Hotjar and MonkeyLearn I can visualize customer feedback in huge detail,” he said. “The tools work on our site to gather feedback from real users, understand the semantics behind the qualitative data, and produce reports on the results.” Green’s business now better understands, “what our target audience wants and expects from our business, informing the direction of future products and services.” Green recommends that entrepreneurs, “review all parts of their business, especially the bottlenecks, to see if AI tools can improve productivity and efficiency or help to progress them faster.”
General administrative tasks, including research, analysis, basic content creation and scheduling need no longer be done by a human. Learn how to use the tools at your disposal to remove the low-level tasks monopolizing your diary and do the work that only you can do. Connecting, strategizing, and being a visionary founder are what you’re here for; now there’s no excuse for that not to happen for most of each day.
