5 Ways Solopreneurs Can Use AI To Get More Done In Less Time

You know you should be using AI in your business, but taking the first steps can be intimidating if you’re new to it.

The good news is are a number of popular tools you can use to create new content such as text and images: chatGPT, Claude2, Google Bard, Perplexity, Midjourney and Dall-E-3, to name some well-known ones. They can be used in many areas of a small business, including sales and marketing, operations, finance and executive level functions, like business development. Only 12% of U.S. residents said they have used generative AI to generate text as of January 2023, according to the market research firm Statista, so if you use it, you’ll be an early adopter.

For insight on how small businesses can integrate generative AI, such as chatGPT, into their daily operations, I spoke recently with Brett Ramberg, CEO of Ramberg Labs, which does AI consulting for businesses out of Loveland, Colo.

Here are some ideas:

1. Research: Many small business owners devote time every week to business development, but researching all of those ideas and organizing your findings can be time consuming. You can make the process easier by prompting chatGPT or another tool to pull information from the internet. “You want to give it as much context as you can about the situation and the goal you’re trying to achieve,” says Ramberg. “It’s almost like telling a story around what you’re doing and defining the problem.” Showing the tool an example of the desired result can also help.

2. Speed up brainstorming: If you’re considering trying a new marketing approach, you can use generative AI to come up with ideas you can tailor. Let’s say you run a leadership consultancy targeting small business, and want to attract prospects with your ideas on empathy through a series of LinkedIn posts. You can ask the tool to generate ideas for the posts to get a sense of approaches you might use. If you want the tone to be similar to someone well-known, like Gary Vaynerchuk, you can add that to the prompt.

3. Improve productivity: Once you find an approach you like in your brainstorming, you can use some of the results of the brainstorming to speed up the work you do. For instance, if one of those Gary V-style LinkedIn posts resonates, you can cut and paste it into LinkedIn and edit it, so it sounds natural to you. “It’s very important there is a human in the loop,” says Ramberg. “It has to have a human touch.”

You can also use AI for editing tasks. If the post that it spits out is too long, you can use a prompt such as “Shorten this post by 50%” to save yourself the time.

4. Sprucing up documents. Ramberg creates a lot of slide decks in his work and finds that AI is very useful in creating backgrounds. You can, for instance, upload your logo and ask a tool such as chatGPT to create a slide around the logo.

5. Weeding out tasks you don’t want to do. If you’re looking for ways to reduce the number of repetitive or menial tasks you do, you can ask a generative AI tool to tackle some. For instance, it can write an email for you acknowledging that a customer’s order was received, in the tone and voice of a business owner.

Ultimately, says, Ramberg, “AI is an answer engine. It’s a different way of thinking about getting knowledge. In a small business, you can’t have too many answers or too much knowledge.