Key Podcast Highlights

What Are 5 Prompts You Can Use for Your AI Software Application?

1. Ask your AI software to work on macros for you. Creating macros typically requires knowledge of formulas. However, these applications can help you create them quickly and easily.

2. Use your AI software to find out the best time to publish your content like blog posts. The software will read that blog and make suggestions based on the content.

3. Consider your AI software to be like an executive assistant. For instance, if you have a contract from a supplier, you can upload the contract to ChatGPT. It will read it and give you points of view.

4. Ask your AI software to create a business continuity plan. For instance, you can go on ChatGPT and say, “as a seasoned operations consultant, develop a detailed business continuity plan for my business in this industry.”

5. Use your AI software to get pointers on customer service. If you have an unhappy customer, you can go to ChatGPT and ask it to coach you on how to create a tactful response to this customer email.

Transcript

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Gene (00:02):

Hey everybody, it’s Gene Marks and welcome to this week’s episode of the Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. This week, I wanna talk a little bit about AI and AI prompting. I wanna give you five great prompts to use for your AI software application. Now, these are great prompts to use with ChatGPT if you’re a ChatGPT user, they are great prompts to use with Microsoft Bing Chat. It’s pretty much the same thing as ChatGPT, by the way. They’re also great prompts to use if you’re a Google Gemini user or even an Anthropic user as well, which is a fast growing popular platform that’s rivaling ChatGPT and others. Remember, ChatGPT and the ones that are like it and ChatGPT is really the leader in this space.

Gene (00:50):

These are generative AI platforms where you can ask it questions and it can generate for you responses to help you do more stuff. Now, a lot of times if you’re going on ChatGPT for example, you really don’t know where to get started and you don’t want to… what should you be asking it? So, lemme give you five great prompts to try on ChatGPT and you tell me or come back to me in, in the comments of this podcast, let me know what you think of them. Okay? So first is with macros. Now to create a macro in a spreadsheet, be it Google Sheets or Excel, for example. You pretty much need a Ph.D in macros to do it. Nobody knows how to write macros.

Gene (01:33):

And to create a macro, it’s an automation tool, right? You go into a spreadsheet, you can literally have it do like 3, 4, 5 things at the same time, if you know what you’re doing to create the formula. And again, nobody knows how to create macros ’cause it seems so hard to do. But you know what? ChatGPT, Gemini, Bing Chat, Anthropic, all these chat box applications, they can help you do it. So if you’ve come up with a macro, like say you wanna calculate the average of cells in a period in a row, and then you wanna then automatically insert that result somewhere else, instead of figuring out what the formula is, ask ChatGPT. Go, “Hey, I need to create a macro that calculates the average of cells B1 to B10 and inserts the result in cell C1.

Gene (02:24):

Can you help me with that?” If you upload the spreadsheet to ChatGPT or the other platforms I mentioned, and ask it that question, it will create the macro for you. And then you can copy and paste that macro into the spreadsheet and you’re all said and done. So if you ever had a hard time doing macros, use ChatGPT and the like to do ’em for you. That’s number one. Number two, say you’re publishing blogs and nobody’s reading your blogs, or you wanna get more readers. Well, a lot of it has to do with the timing. And when you’re actually publishing out there. When do people read these blogs the most? Well just ask ChatGPT. Go on the ChatGPT, and again, they’re, they’re similar other platforms. Hey, here’s a blog…

Gene (03:06):

And upload the blog ChatGPT and say find the best time to publish this content. It will read that blog. Look at it, and it will suggest based on the content, the industry, the details in it. I recommend the best times to publish are between this time and that time. It will literally tell you when you should be publishing that blog. And by the way, you can ask it for more information. Like, oh, suppose I want to do this, or I want to change the information to this, or I wanna have a different author or whatever. It will change its responses for you depending on the information you give it. So you wanna know when to best publish content? Ask ChatGPT. Next has to do with contracts. Now remember, ChatGPT and chatbots that are assistants.

Gene (03:50):

They’re like your executive assistants. I mean, they’re providing advice and help to you. So say you’ve got a contract that you got from a supplier or a customer and you just, you’re reading through it and you’re like, okay, seems okay to me, but what do I know? Or is there anything out there I should be aware of? Upload the contract to ChatGPT and ask it. Please review this contract. What issues should I be concerned about? Where am I liable? What questions would you have? What are some of your other thoughts? ChatGPT will read the entire contract, give you its points of view, based on its large language model that it’s been trained on. Now, will all of its suggestions or comments or whatever be correct? I mean, probably not, but I mean, it’s another set of eyes that’s looking at your contract, giving you some thoughts and advice that you can take back to somebody else, maybe an expert or an advisor.

Gene (04:41):

It will certainly start you on that conversation. The fourth prompt that I like has to do with business continuity plans. I mean, we all know that we should have a disaster plan or a continuity plan. I mean, many of us are in hurricane areas, tornado areas or just if we get hacked or other disruptions to our business. Every expert, every advisor says you need to have a business continuity plan. But where do you even start? Ask ChatGPT, go on ChatGPT and say, “Hey, as a seasoned operations consultant, develop a detailed business continuity plan for my business in this industry.” Address such areas as crisis communications or operational resilience and recovery strategies and the roles and responsibilities of key personnel in managing the disruption. And you can ask and make other requests for it as well.

Gene (05:34):

ChatGPT will take that information and it will literally create a business continuity plan for you. So it will generate it. You can read through it. Of course, you don’t rely a hundred percent on it, so you take it to your IT consultant or your attorney or any other business advisor and have them read through it. But man, it really gets you in the red zone. And then between you and your advisors, you can carry it over the goal line. Finally, because I promised five good prompts here for ChatGPT. How about from customer service? Let’s say you get an unhappy customer on your hands and you wanna respond back to ’em and you want to try and maintain this relationship. Go to ChatGPT, share with ChatGPT whatever emails that you receive from that customer. Say, “Hey, ChatGPT, coach me on how to create a tactful response to this customer email.

Gene (06:25):

You can say to it, ensure that my response will be professional, considerate, informative and reinforce the company’s commitment to customer satisfaction. You can even tell it, show me different examples using these different tones, firm, compliant, conciliatory, apologetic and it’ll give you different responses to it as well. So it will coach you and help you wordsmith a response to a customer that’s appropriate. So that hopefully will solve issues and also keep that customer as a customer. So I’ve just shared with you five really great prompts for ChatGPT. It’ll help you create macros. It will tell you when to publish a blog. It will help you review contracts, it will help you create a business continuity or disaster plan. It will coach you on responding to a customer’s email. All of those things that if you can imagine many more ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Chat, Google Gemini, Anthropic and other chatbots will help you do that.

Gene (07:26):

Guys, lean into this stuff. This is an expert assistant that will get to know you better. It’s trained on the most recent information. It’s got your back. It’s not gonna be a hundred percent right, what assistant is a hundred percent right? But you can be asking your questions about not only your business, but daily issues that you’re encountering in your business and getting feedback and help and constructing answers and writing stuff, or just giving you advice that will just add to your knowledge so you can make better decisions. Those are just five examples of good prompts. And by the way, if you’re interested in writing better prompts for ChatGPT, OpenAI has got its own prompt engineering guide. So just Google Open AI’s prompt engineering guide, and you will find it and it’ll give you more prompts, examples, and some lessons in creating the right prompts. It’s all about asking the right questions to get the best answers. Well listen, you have been listening to me, Gene Marks on The Hartford’s Weekly Small Biz Ahead podcast. I hope that you got some good information out of this. If you need any tips or advice or help in running your business, visit us please at SmallBizAhead.com or SBA.TheHartford.com. Again, my name is Gene Marks. Thank you for listening to this message and I hope it has been helpful. We will see you again next week. Take care.

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