In the early 1990s, people were saying that the internet was a fad; it wouldn’t last; and why did we need it? These past few years, we’ve been hearing the same thing about AI (artificial intelligence).
While AI has been around for a long time, it wasn’t readily available to the average Josephine like you and me. However, today it’s all the rage. Several months ago, I made a post on Facebook asking who was using AI in their business – there was an outpouring of answers …. Yes, yes every day, yes for everything. And while I had not really dipped my toe into AI for anything in my business, I’ve now embraced it fully.
How about you? Let’s get real – AI is here to stay!
Here are some uses that I see small business owners using AI for regularly and I’d love to hear back from you about what you are doing with AI.
Here are just a couple of ideas to get you brainstorming on how you could harness the time-saving effect of AI:
1. Speaking is a wonderful way to grow your business and recently I’ve been shown a couple of ways that AI can help me get more speaking gigs. First, I took a 2 hour mini-course with my friend/mentor Steve Lowell on how to get more speaking gigs from conferences that have put out calls for speaking. So enlightening.
Earlier this year, I watched Suzanne Evans share how she and her team had perfected using AI to craft customized signature talks for their clients. WOW.
2. Systematizing and automating your business is a great time saver and a way to free up more of your time. Just this past week, a client shared with me how she had used AI to research and then had it write code so she could systematize sending out the T4s to her employees via email – all automated! While the code needed some tweaking by an expert, AI had done the majority of the work. This saved her hours of manual work.
What do you spend hours doing that could be possibly automated with the help of AI?
3. AI is also a great tool for drafting role descriptions, an essential part of a self-running business engine. While it’s not perfect, by changing your prompts, you’ll get a pretty good draft to get you started. Do you have a role description for yourself as the CEO? Try using AI to draft your own!
4. Creating authority-building content using AI is still up for debate in my mind! Some gurus say yes, others avoid it completely. However, AI is great for researching and brainstorming. One thing I have noticed is that AI seems to like certain words and you can often spot AI written content that way. However, have no fear, NONE of my blogs are written with AI – it’s me sitting at my desk (or today in the car) writing for you!
One of the most difficult challenges when using AI seems to be learning how to ‘prompt’ it effectively. You have to be clear and specific when giving AI directions – you need to be clear about what you want, the perspective you need, and how you will use the insights.
Here’s one I recently used to help a client niche down:
Research and prepare a table comparing the profitability and growth potential of the following two niches for a __________ business. (90 seconds later the table appeared and the recommendation was made). Not bad!
Here’s one that Lisa Larter wrote about in her recent blog:
“Create a content matrix with 5 high-level categories that my target audience would find interesting. For each category, generate a list of content types (e.g. myths, best practices, cheat codes). Use the matrix to brainstorm specific content ideas. Then write blog-worthy content for 2-3 ideas from the matrix including strong, attention-grabbing hooks as titles or subjects for each post.” Cool – right?
But again, notice that for each prompt you need to be specific about your target audience, what you want from it, and how you are going to use the results that AI generates. It takes being clear on your core foundational business activities to generate great results from the AI tool.
AI has come a long way in recent years and I expect it’s here to stay. Don’t get left behind – just learn to use it the best way for you and your business! After all, when you want more free time away from your business, putting in a little hard work now to learn to use AI effectively is bound to save you time in the future!
YOU CAN DO THIS!
Diana
