Innovative ways of using ChatGPT in your business

Discovering ChatGPT now is similar to learning you’ve been pronouncing Quinoa wrong your entire life; given its popularity, it’s something you should know of already. In fact, ChatGPT is so popular that it reached 100 million users within two months of its release. That figure would be surprising if the remarkable abilities of this AI chatbot weren’t so apparent. 

Open AI’s ChatGPT is a machine-learning neural network. It uses deep learning algorithms and lots of data to process and understand natural language. You could think of it as an artificial brain that’s constantly learning and evolving. 

In essence, it interprets and analyzes language patterns, learns from the data it receives, and generates intelligent responses that are contextually relevant and meaningful. In simpler terms, you write a prompt, ChatGPT interprets that prompt and then responds with a contextual answer. 

Surprise, surprise — this Undercover Geek’s interested. 

Despite both occupational worries and ethical concerns, it seems I’m not alone. Tech giants are moving fast around the globe. Microsoft announced it’s using ChatGPT for the latest version of Bing. Apple is using a customized version of BlueMail. And demonstrations of the AI tool in smart home devices are beginning to surface online. 

Clearly, many believe ChatGPT is changing the business world for good. The question is — how might it change yours?

Prompt: Why is everyone talking about ChatGPT? 

In the modern world, content is key. If most brands should be online (and they should), then they’ll need content to attract, engage, and retain customers. From social media campaigns to targeted emails, the ways you can tackle content creation are almost overwhelming. 

In 2022, creating content that appeals to target audiences accounted for 45% of marketers’ biggest challenges, with generating ideas coming two places behind. The process is costly, time-consuming, and easy to get wrong.

Mel Fowler, owner of The Forest Loft, a Reiki Healing business, told me, 

‘‘As a micro business, we lack the time to create good content & the funds to pay someone else to. As a result, the website has barely been updated since it was built 2 years ago & our social media presence is virtually non-existent.’’

Businesses need an answer to curve the hurdles they face. And as we know, those hurdles aren’t going away — they’re getting worse.

ChatGPT may just be the very thing to turn the tide.

The tool’s ability to enhance research, create written content, and even write code is boosting businesses everywhere. Blog writing in 2023 feels almost synonymous with ChatGPT, and social posts, website copy, and email marketing seem just as intertwined.

But businesses have needs beyond these — needs that a lack of human, financial, or social resources make difficult to meet.

So, let’s see if ChatGPT is all talk, or if you can harness its capabilities to drive innovation and overcome development issues you could be facing right now. 

Prompt: I need to develop a product, help? 

Whether you feel like you’re moments away from success or you’ve not even started ideating yet, ChatGPT can help with product development from start to finish.

As you may have felt already, developing an original, long-lasting, and market-shaping offering is a mission in itself. And innovation is one of the key ingredients of a successful product or service. 

But what really is innovation? Let’s ask ChatGPT.

Most will agree that better is better, and employing an innovative mindset should sound like a good thing to any business owner or brand builder. According to Viima, a developer renowned for innovative management software,

‘‘84% of executives say that innovation is important to their growth strategy’’ and that any organization has to ‘‘be good at coming up with new ideas, evaluating and choosing ideas, as well as developing and commercializing those ideas.’’ 

Why? Customers’ needs are always changing, competitors are evolving every day, and your business is constantly at risk. An innovative mindset isn’t just desirable — it’s essential. 

So let’s activate ChatGPT to test its product development potential and see if we can use a little innovation on the way. 

First up, product ideation: 

Analyzing the response, it appears that ChatGPT can understand the basics in seconds. I requested that the AI assistant break down all major components of a smart pen, so I could weigh up what I might need, how challenging the product might be to create, and, in part, to see whether or not smart pens are really a bright idea — using ChatGPT to help is an obvious efficiency booster. 

Now apply this method to any product or service in any market, couple it with ChatGPT market research, and you’re quickly testing viability across the board. 

But of course, true innovators look through the eyes of their customers first. 

So, before we get into developing the product itself, let’s see if ChatGPT can help us to conquer the lifelong difficulties of giving the people what they actually want.

Prompt: Can you really get to know my crowd?

A simple questionnaire should give us a few answers. I asked ChatGPT for some ideas of questions we could include for a questionnaire for smart pen users:

ChatGPT just created a reasonably comprehensive questionnaire. From improvement suggestions to use patterns, the AI tool generated well-considered, basics-covered material that you can use in various stages of your development. By including ‘users of smart pens’ in our prompt, ChatGPT will have harnessed its knowledge of potential buyer wants and needs, product attributes, and common issues… without us having to research and input them. 

Naturally, you’d need a method for getting the data. So I asked ChatGPT to suggest some great ways of engaging with participants to fill out surveys. The AI assistant quickly generated suggestions like QR codes on promo material and partnering with businesses to share those surveys. 

With a few simple prompts, we’re tackling complex stages to knowing our product in mere moments. 

Clearly, we’re not just coming up with a ‘great’ idea and ‘seeing if it lands.’ We’re using ChatGPT to understand what, why, and how we should be innovating, as well as shaving days and potentially weeks off of development time. 

As Harry Cooper, owner of Purple Jam, an Audio Game development company, puts it, 

‘‘When developing audio games for the blind and visually impaired gaming community, there were a very large number of unknowns, if myself and colleagues had had ChatGPT, the ‘ideation’ phase of development would have been significantly reduced.’ “

Using the prompt ‘‘Give me some unique ways of enhancing a smart pen’s design,’’ let’s see if ChatGPT can harness its knowledge of smart pen buyers to inform groundbreaking product ideas… and generate them in less than a minute. 

ChatGPT’s attention to detail and variety is becoming clearer. The mention of accessibility for disabled users could change your product direction entirely. The eco-friendly suggestion might have just shifted your brand positioning. And augmented reality integration could put you at the forefront of future smart pen development. 

Sure, ChatGPT can’t actually develop the pen. But now that you’ve freed up time, saved money, and overcome those business hurdles — you can.

It’s clear that the tool is a brilliant means of ideation and research. Using only ChatGPT, you could move on to

• concept development
• prototype suggestions
• more market research
• data management
• participant testing frameworks
• asset management

And it can even support more mundane tasks like organizing, customer service, and scheduling appointments and meetings too. So, with ChatGPT generating evidence of groundwork efficacy, we can now uncover how it rises to the challenge of deeper project management. 

Prompt: How can ChatGPT support me in managing my project?

Let’s imagine I need an ad calendar for a tech-driven, forward-thinking running shoe.

From community building to product showcasing, my hypothetical marketing team and I are now brimming with ideas. We could concentrate on further development, again using ChatGPT, or make use of more free time to perform other tasks and develop personal skills. 

This use could also save painfully long and energy-hungry meetings, reduce wage worries from financial fears, and shrink project timelines to keep clients happy. For solopreneurs with nobody to bounce ideas off, ChatGPT just prevented creative block and tunnel vision, and freed up your entire morning. 

ChatGPT’s breakdown then went on to cover a range of progressive marketing avenues. Hashtag campaigns, growing from #TrackYourRun to #ImproveYourRun, and Q&As linking professional runners to prospective fans one week before a developer Q&A hit the timeline too. 

My take? ChatGPT isn’t just spewing out a few mismatched ideas for content — it has a clear understanding of, or at least an ability to recognize, how an advertising campaign might develop over time. 

And with proven, contemporary marketing methods as its fuel, the result is unique, well-considered, and effective marketing strategies in a short space of time. Of course, this is unrestricted by product or service — whatever you’re selling, ChatGPT will adapt. 

Prompt: Okay, but can you turn those ideas into reality?

According to Ironpaper, ‘‘83% of marketers believe it’s more effective to create higher quality content less often.’’ And in a growing competitive world, the need for quality grows too. So how can we continue the quality of the ad calendar to make effective content in a way that’s genuinely going to help your business?

Why don’t we expand on that ad calendar a little and use ChatGPT to design one of the content suggestions it gave us?

First, a title appeared — “Take Your Running to the Next Level with Our Smart Running Shoe.” And then suggestions like, ‘Closing shot: The runner smiling and holding up the shoe while the brand logo appears on the screen.’ quickly followed. But this wasn’t gripping, and as a business owner, this felt far from innovative. I needed more.

With a simple prompt tweak, ‘Could you be a little bit more creative?’ I may just have got it.

The AI provided a clear progression of respectable advertising qualities. ChatGPT conveyed the dynamics of product usage, included more detail than the first version of this script, more on-screen variation, and improved the title to great effect. 

The CTA is clear and, most importantly, unprompted (again hinting at ChatGPT’s ability to cover the fundamentals well).

Once more, you just saved time and energy. But this time, you did so with more than just an outline; you generated well-considered content. 

Sure, you still have to produce it, but for blogs, social posts, and other media, with the right prompt, you can create exciting content before your morning coffee.

Fowler agrees. ChatGPT now allows her to work, in her words,

‘‘extremely quickly & easily with quality in mind, allowing us to devote our time to what we do best – helping clients to bring balance & healing to their bodies & lives.’’ 

Clearly, the basics can be quality, and the direction it can give is even better. With quantity and quality possible, what about more complex needs? 

This is the business world, after all.

Prompt: Let’s think about this one

One of the strongest aspects of ChatGPT is its ability to adapt and deepen responses based on your approach. You can manipulate parameters, request specific considerations, and teach ChatGPT how to work for you. 

The best example I discovered is the combination of adventurous and creative content testing in tandem with limiting factor awareness  — you can dream big and dodge a few curveballs at the same time.

To show you, let’s take our running shoe ad script and see if ChatGPT can adapt to some common business limitations. Here’s what I tried:

‘Try another version, but this time use somebody navigating through a city at night. Try being even more creative as a director and make sure every choice you make is with a low-budget production in mind.’ 

Here’s what ChatGPT replied:

Top of the Ferris wheel? A tad ambitious. 

But yet again, we have proof of ChatGPT being a dexterous tool for creative direction and problem-solving. And let’s face it — this ad would, or at the very least could, hold up against big brand ideas today. 

Now imagine the number of parameters you could alter: location, visual style, length, shot types, narrative — and this is just for a video script. 

You could outline any content type based on recent market trends and demographic breakdowns…  and ChatGPT has identified all of this for you.

From ideation to marketing, research to organization, ChatGPT may just live up to its reputation. 

A Prompt Reminder

According to Demandsage, ChatGPT had 13 million individual active daily users as of January 2023. User figures will most likely rise as the technology gets even better. You should also know that right now, ChatGPT uses data to reply to your prompts up until 2021. So if you need answers to anything beyond then, you’ll need ‘old-school’ search engines to help. 

Despite timeline boundaries, ChatGPT is still moving forward — each and every time anyone uses the tool, it becomes more accurate, better with context, and improved all-around. The tool will evolve rapidly. And many of the shortfalls you either identified here or in your own use won’t exist in years to come. 

Right now, you can head over to Open AI to use ChatGPT. To try it out, signup for free with an email, and you’re all set to start innovating. You can also learn about the ChatGPT Plus subscription and check out the latest GPT-3 development progress too.