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Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of this episode of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run and grow your small business.

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Resources:

• Free Download: ChatGPT Guide for Small Business Owners
• Book Recommendation: The Business Case for AI: A Leader’s Guide to AI Strategies, Best Practices & Real-World Applications by Kavita Ganesan

Related Podcast Episodes:

Episode 482: Kevin Surace – Artificial Intelligence for Small Business

Episode 484: AI & ChatGPT Introduction

You can find other episodes of The How of Business podcast, the best small business podcast, on our Archives page.

Sponsor:

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Transcript:

The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Henry Lopez (00:12):

Welcome to this episode of the How of Business Podcast. This is Henry Lopez, and on this episode, I’m going to share with you some of the ways that I’m using AI, artificial intelligence in my small business today. You can find all of the Howa business resources, including a new download. The download is called Small Business Owners Guide to ChatGPT. You can find that on the show notes page for this episode, as well as information on my one-on-one and group coaching programs at the how of business.com. I also invite you to please consider supporting this podcast on Patreon, and please subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any new episodes. So let’s get right into it. This is in no particular order, and as I’ve shared before, as I’ve talked about AI on this podcast, I am far from being any type of expert on ai.

Henry Lopez (01:00):

I’m trying the best I can, as I’m sure many of you are, to learn about, to stay ahead of it, which is impossible for me to maybe stay not too far behind, might be a better way to say it, but to continue to look for ways to apply AI in my business, to make me more productive, to make me more efficient, all of those things I’m looking for by using AI in my business. And I challenge all of you to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, to experiment with it, to try it, to leverage the technology as much as possible in everything that you do, whether you’re in a business now or even in your career. If you’re working in the corporate world, learn about as much as you can about AI and apply it and use it as much as you can.

Henry Lopez (01:44):

We cannot be left behind on this technology. It will be, it is a differentiator and it will be, and it is already beginning to be one of the ways that businesses are separating themselves. The businesses that are being more effective, more efficient, more productive, more competitive are leveraging this technology. So in no particular order in my business, one of the things I do is I produce this episode and I produce this show, the How of Business podcast. So I’ve been using AI technology to help me with that production, with that process of producing an episode. And so I’ll share that with you at a high level and maybe that’ll give you some ideas on how similarly you might apply it in your business. You don’t create an episode perhaps, but you’ll get the idea of how you might apply it for content creation and so forth.

Henry Lopez (02:32):

So I’ve been using ChatGPT now for I guess a couple of years. I have the paid version, the pro version, I believe it’s called. I Pay $20 a month. So just so you know, that’s the version that I’m using of ChatGPT, and I use it for all types of content creation. But as it relates to creating an episode, I’ll use it to help me get ready to prepare for an episode to help me put together the outline, the content that I’m going to talk about. If I’m interviewing somebody, for example, I might have it go to that person’s website and gather information there to help me come up with good questions to ask, but I’m using it instead of me having to do everything from scratch to help me put together the content. That’s part of what I’m going to put together for that episode.

Henry Lopez (03:16):

Put together the outline, the questions, and then after I record an episode in particular, when it’s an interview episode, I use a platform called rev.com. And there are many out there, and I don’t have any type of affiliate relationship with this platform, but it’s cost-effective. I’ve been using it for a while, and they offer transcription services. So after I record an episode, I take that audio file, I log into my rev.com account, I upload the audio file, and I use their AI based transcription service. They also have human transcription, but it’s much more expensive, and the AI transcription is extremely good and very affordable. So let’s say a 30 minute episode might cost five to $10, something in that range. So it takes about five minutes at the most. I upload it, it creates a transcript, and now I’ve got this additional content that I can use further in the process, including adding that transcript to my website page, the show notes page, because that generally gives me some good SEO rich content for that page related to the episode.

Henry Lopez (04:26):

So that’s one of the ways that I’m using that transcription. But further than I’ve in ChatGPT, you have the ability, I think this is with the paid version, I’m not sure, to create workflows. So what I then do with that transcript is I load it back up to ChatGPT, I’ve created an automated workflow, and then uploading that file, that transcript, and it kicks off a series of things that it’s going to do, it’s going to create a summary for me, which is what I use on the show notes page. Now, I don’t use it a hundred percent, I tweak it, I edit it, I change it, some of the wording I’ll adjust, but it gets me certainly 80% or more of the way there. So it creates that content for me. Then I have it automatically create a couple of title suggestions. Sometimes I use ’em, sometimes I don’t.

Henry Lopez (05:11):

Or sometimes it gives me an idea for something different. Then I have it create automatically a post on LinkedIn because I usually post about a new episode on LinkedIn. So it creates the post for me. Again, do I take it a hundred percent as it generates it and paste it and post it on LinkedIn? No, I’ll adjust it, I’ll tweak it. Sometimes it’s pretty darn close. Sometimes I got to make some more edits, but it saves me so much time to have it create that first draft that then I can leverage for all of these pieces of content that I create to promote an episode and to post an episode. So I haven’t put a number to it, which is an interesting question, but we’re talking about considerable time saved and considerable effort. So it eliminates, if nothing else, if you do any kind of writing copywriting or any type of writing, we all suffer sometimes from a block in creativity.

Henry Lopez (06:05):

Well, this eliminates that because I already have something to start with. I don’t have to rack my brain about what do I say here and how do I say it? It gives me a great first draft of nothing else that then makes it so much easier for me to take it and finalize it and get it posted. So that’s one of the ways that I’m using the AI technology ChatGPT primarily there in that example, to create content related to an episode and an online tool called rev.com. And again, there’s lots of these out there. I just happen to be using this tool for some time now, and I use the AI transcription service to create the transcript that then kicks off everything else that ChatGPT does for me. Now, another example where I’m using an AI tool is in Zoom. I’m in Zoom all day long.

Henry Lopez (06:51):

That’s the platform that I use to conduct my coaching session. So if you’re a coaching client of mine or if you’ve had a free consultation with me, we do that over Zoom and I use the Zoom AI companion, which is built in, it’s included. Now, I’m on a paid version of Zoom, but this tool, this AI tool creates a summary of the meeting. And let me tell you, it’s fairly comprehensive and accurate, and it does a great job at summarizing the key discussion points that we’ve had during a call. So where it saves me considerable time and it makes everything so much more effective, is I, after each coaching session with my clients, I send a follow-up email with the key action items and a summary of what we’ve talked about. That’s good for me to then remember later in the next call, but also great for my client, for them to get a synopsis as well as be able to refer to it as notes of what we talked about.

Henry Lopez (07:45):

And most critically, what’s most important next, that prioritization, which is so powerful. So this AI tool in Zoom that’s included in Zoom, you just have to turn it on, creates this great AI based summary and it’s very accurate, very effective. It’s not perfect, but well more than close enough. And for me to have created that type of a detailed summary would take hours. It just would not be cost effective. It just wouldn’t have the time to do it. Now I’m getting a great summary that helps me highlight for my coaching clients what’s most important next, what were the key things that we talked about in that coaching session, and I include that. Then that summary, that Zoom sends, it sends me an email with this summary. I then forward that to my client along with my own summary of the key points of the meeting.

Henry Lopez (08:38):

So that’s an example with Zoom as the example that I mentioned a moment ago with rev.com where I’m leveraging, as I’m sure all of you are, I hope that you are AI technologies that are emerging in the tools that we already use. And I think that certainly going to be primarily how most people will leverage ai, and that’s fantastic. So if that’s you or if that’s you and your business, then I encourage you to experiment with, to use, to take advantage of all of these current and fast emerging AI technologies that are becoming available in the tools we already use your CRM, your point of sale, in my case, zoom as my meeting platform for transcription. All of these tools that already exist without us having to even have to go learn how to use ai, they’re there. These tools are there now. So we must take advantage of them and learn how to apply them to make us more efficient.

Henry Lopez (09:38):

I talked about content creation and ChatGPT is the platform that I use, and it’s just because that’s what I started using. I don’t necessarily have a preference. I haven’t evaluated them all. There are several out there besides ChatGPT, some of the other popular, what they call large language models. You may have heard that term LLMs, but like ChatGPT include Google’s, Gemini, they used to call it Barge, Andros, clawed. It’s become very popular as well, Microsoft copilot, although I’ve been dabbling with it a little bit and I don’t find it as productive, but that’s just my experience. And me Lama. So there are other LLMs out there. I’m not saying that ChatGPT is what you should use. That’s just what I’ve been using and what I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with. But I can tell you that I’m only scratching the surface of how to use it.

Henry Lopez (10:26):

I’m learning every day how to get more and more out of ChatGPT. So whatever model you’re using, I encourage you to continue learning how to get the most out of it. And a lot of it is about how you prompt it, how you ask questions, and I’ll get to some tips for that here in a moment. But another example of where I’m using ChatGPT is in reviewing contracts and agreements. So for example, I was working with a client recently helping them review a franchise agreement. And so I used ChatGPT, I shared with it the franchise agreement and had it give me various summaries and analysis of the language. Now, I’m not going to recommend to anybody that you do that in lieu of having an attorney review a contract or an agreement, but for those initial reviews, for those initial conversations or negotiations for you to understand what’s in the language and what the potential impact are or is of this language that’s in this agreement, it’s incredible how powerful it is.

Henry Lopez (11:25):

Sure, I should still read it, but I have ChatGPT summarize it for me and highlight what are those key languages, the key clauses that I should be concerned with, interpret them for me, compare them, analyze them for me, and it was so effective and so efficient to help me understand what was in this agreement. And so what it led to then is the client that I’m referring to is now going to have a conversation with that franchisor about several of the clauses in that agreement to make sure that there’s clarity there. Again, ideally they’ll still consult with an attorney before they sign that agreement, but so much more efficient and effective in applying it that way. So it’s not just for content creation. There is an example where using an LLM like ChatGPT to review a complex document like an agreement or a contract I mentioned already as I get ready for an episode research ChatGPT is an incredible platform or any of the other LLMs to do research, and that’s I think one of the big game changers. Sure, we can still do research on Google and Google, as you may have noticed if you’ve been searching on Google recently that it’s starting to now give you an answer at the top that is AI generated. So that is yet another example of how we can leverage AI technology continuing to use something like Google for search. So that is another example of where when doing research, we are now able to do so just amplified with this technology. I’m currently looking at a complimentary business offering to the how a business, and I traditionally would’ve gone about it with creating a business plan, the traditional method of doing the analysis and the research. But what I’m doing now for the first time, and it’s really been so eyeopening, so incredibly powerful, is I’m having ChatGPT prompt me through the process.

Henry Lopez (13:16):

So I started with a folder or a project in ChatGPT because it’ll remember all of what I share and what all that it analyzes. It keeps in memory, but it keeps that indefinitely and I can keep coming to it. It’s like an assistant that’s sitting there waiting very patiently. It doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t have to go take time off. It doesn’t have to rest. It’s always there for me patiently waiting. And as I get an idea or I get a question, I’ll pop over to that tab that I have open always on my screen and say, Hey, remember this, or add this to the open tasks, or how would we do this? And I’ve had it prompt me through creating step-by-step this plan for how I might roll out this additional service offering. And it has really completely changed the way that I go about building a business plan.

Henry Lopez (15:20):

So that’s part of this researching and more than just content creation, but helping me think through either problem solving or in this case creating a plan for a new service offering or a new business for that matter. I’ve mentioned integration before and I know I’m jumping all around here. There’s no particular order to these things. These are just different areas in which I’m applying AI technology, but I use a tool called Zapier, but it leverages AI to create integration points. As an example, when someone joins my Patreon group, I have a Zapier that takes that information and adds it to my email list. And so all of these different integrations, we have different systems that maybe aren’t automatically connected. We can use either the native integration tools that those platforms have or a tool like Zapier. And again, I don’t have any particular preference for Zapier or any type of relationship.

Henry Lopez (16:13):

It’s just a tool that I’ve used that has AI technology embedded in it that makes this possible. It used to be when we think back to systems 10 years ago, 20 years ago, back when I was in the software industry, integration was a challenge. Making different systems talk to each other was a challenge. And so we ended up going with these monolithic platforms to solve that problem. But really where we’re at today is we can go best in class and select the best tool for the particular job, whether it’s CRM or POS or whatever the case might be, and they’ll talk to each other or we’ll make them talk to each other with a tool like Zapier, I’m simplifying things, but it is so much easier now to connect disparate applications in part because of these AI technologies like what Zapier provides. Another example related to that, I mentioned email, but I use MailChimp.

Henry Lopez (17:08):

Again, no particular preference there. It’s just a platform that I’ve been using is MailChimp for email marketing. I’ve used Constant Contact as well. They’re both comparable. But in MailChimp, a simple example of the point of leveraging AI that’s emerging or already in the tools that you currently use. It seems simple, but it’s really powerful. But when I go to send an email, it offers the option of it telling me what’s the most optimized time to send that email and what it’s doing there. It’s, its leveraging AI to look at the history of the emails that I’ve sent to Predict, and I’m sure there’s other components in that algorithm, but to predict when would be the most effective time to get an email in front of the majority of my recipients, the people on my list, I mentioned Microsoft Copilot. To be honest, I haven’t really been using it as much.

Henry Lopez (17:59):

I don’t see yet where it can help me that much. I’m starting to try to use it within the Microsoft tool. So I happen to operate on a Microsoft platform using the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. And yes, it provides some functionality there. I’m curious if you’re using copilot today or for that matter, any platform that you’re using that you’d like to share, would love for you to share in the comments and share with me and with others how you’re using any AI tool, but specifically copilot. Now, let’s get to ChatGPT or any LLM prompting. The term prompting has become the word that they use for how we ask ChatGPT questions. And so there really is a method to that to get the most out of ChatGPT or again, any other LLM. So when I say ChatGPT here going forward, just replace it with whatever LLM you are using.

Henry Lopez (18:53):

But Greg Brockman, who is the co-founder and currently the president of OpenAI. OpenAI is the company that produces and provides ChatGPT. He put together an article or an anatomy of a prompt, and I think that’s a great reference for those of us who are learning how to get better and better at prompting ChatGPT. I’m going to have a link in the Sonos page of this episode at the how of business.com to an article about this that I think is a good place to start if you’re trying to get better and better, which we all should be trying to get better and better at prompting. But this article spells out these tips from Brockman as well as other tips on how to ask it, how to ask a question, how to prompt ChatGPT to get the most out of it. So very simple example, and this is a very simple example to make the point, I might prompt or ask ChatGPT this question, write a blog based on the content of this website page and then give it the URL to the website, which by the way, that’s a powerful thing in and of itself.

Henry Lopez (19:58):

So it can go and crawl a website, read that content, bring it into memory, and then based on that content, write a blog post. So that’s to me, incredible even by itself. But to make a prompt like that where I just simply said, write a blog post based on the content on this website page to make that more effective, you could provide additional context by specifying the purpose of the blog, maybe clarifying the desired tone, the length certainly of the post the target audience. And so here’s an example of a version of that same prompt that would be much more effective and get much more out of ChatGPT. So the prompt revised is write a compelling blog post based on the content of this website page and then put in the URL. The blog should be engaging and structured with clear headings, tailor it to target my specific audience of small business owners and ensure it aligns with my tone of professionalism, but yet being accessible and friendly and also in a persuasive manner.

Henry Lopez (21:02):

The post should be approximately 500 words and be optimized for SEO incorporating these relevant keywords naturally. And then I would list the keywords. So there’s a lot to that there, right? So that it’s much more than just asking a simple question like we do when we’re doing a search on Google. And I think that’s, of course, when I first came to ChatGPT, that’s the only way I knew how to ask something like that. A technology a question is how I had been asking Google. And you can do that certainly, and you’re going to get a response, but it’ll be so much more effective and it’s so much more powerful when you give it that additional direction. Now, I could have done the same thing by having started with the simple prompt. It gives me a response and then I tell it, well revise it to add this tone and then revise it again to add these keywords.

Henry Lopez (21:52):

Now revise it to give it headings. So you could do that in an iterative process as well. And I often will do that because if for nothing else, I might be lazy or may not want to stop and think about a more elaborate prompt, I’ll just step through it. Either way, you’re going to get so much more value out of an LLM like ChatGPT if you prompt it more effectively, more correctly if you give it more to work with. So I encourage you to download my new guide to Small Business Owners Guide to ChatGPT. It’s going to include some of the things that I’ve talked about here, how to apply it, how to use it, some of the fundamentals, but also these prompting techniques that I’ve mentioned that’ll be outlined and included in this guide. So go to the show notes page for this episode and download this guide, small Business ChatGPT guide to continue on the topic of how small business owners like myself, perhaps like yourself, are using AI technologies in their business.

Henry Lopez (22:54):

I just wanted to cover some of the key areas to consider, if you haven’t already. One of ’em is in customer support. So for example, more and more businesses are using AI powered chatbots. Now, this is the next generation of chatbots that are much more effective and powerful than the ones we’ve all interacted with on websites, and they’re going to be a lot more human-like. They’re not going to be like a human obviously, but a lot more humanlike and effective in providing that first level of information, that first level of qualification, that first level of customer support on your website as an example. And so more and more people want to get an answer quickly, and they don’t even necessarily want to talk to a person in a lot of cases. And so customer support is a big area where I think we’re going to see more and more small businesses using ai.

Henry Lopez (23:45):

And it also, this goes back to the point I made earlier, that if you are not doing this, if you are not starting to adopt this, your competition is, and they’re going to be better than you are, they’re going to be more effective than you are. They’re going to be able to deliver better support than you are if you get behind and don’t apply these technologies from a marketing perspective, whether it’s everything from writing copy or creating content as I shared that I’m doing, or leveraging it in tools like Canva or using it for analytics and tools like HubSpot, CRM or other tools. Look for in those tools that you’re using now, how you can use AI to make you or your team members more effective and to increase productivity and the quality of what you’re doing with those platforms. Automation. I’ve touched an example like how I use Zapier to drive automation as much as possible.

Henry Lopez (24:38):

I want you to look at your process flows and look for those opportunities to leverage AI based automation, and that’ll save a heck of a lot of time improve accuracy if we don’t have to double enter information or have that gap in time. Those integrations make it so much smoother for the entire process. So look for in your process now, especially again, if you’ve got multiple platforms, multiple systems that need to share data or talk to each other, or one thing happens and one needs to kick off something, let’s say in a project management system, where can you use AI powered integration or automation to improve that process? From a sales and lead generation perspective, I mentioned that all of the CRM tools, HubSpot, Salesforce, all of them are leveraging and providing AI tools to analyze our data and give us information that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to extrapolate.

Henry Lopez (25:38):

Going back to email marketing, I mentioned that I use the scheduling feature, but we can also use the AI feature in those platforms to come up with a better subject line, which we know is key to open rates. So all of those things are available to us in our existing tools. Don’t be afraid to use them and to leverage them and make sure that your team is using them decision making. Of course, as you’re using these different platforms, leverage the AI components to help us make decisions, to help you interpret the data and the information versus you having to take it all. And yeah, it might be on a platform like what Google Analytics, for example, might’ve given us, but now the AI features help us interpret that, which is really at the end of the day, what we need for us to make a business decision on that information.

Henry Lopez (26:27):

So if you’re just getting started as a small business owner, I want you to begin by implementing just one or two AI solutions by exploring the current tools that are part of the platforms that you already have, evaluate the impact, and then keep scaling, keep adding things, keep experimenting. Most of these AI tools, or a lot of them offer free trials, so take advantage of that, but you’ve got to stay on it. You cannot wait for this to become mass market or for it to be explained to you completely. You’re going to have to move in this area of uncertainty and of some confusion, and it is moving so fast that even for someone like myself who’s trying to stay up to date, I’m already behind, so we cannot get left behind to small business owners on how to leverage and apply ai. I’m reading a book now.

Henry Lopez (27:17):

When I finish it, I’ll have a little bit more input, but the book that I’m reading now that was recommended to me is titled The Business Case for AI, A Leader’s Guide to AI Strategies, best Practices, and Real World Applications. I’ll have a link to that book on the show notes page to this episode. And remember, again at the show notes page at the how a business.com. You can find my Small Business Owners guide to ChatGPT. I hope that by sharing how I’m using ai, it encourages you to use AI as well. I hope that some of you are thinking I’m well ahead of where Henry is. That’s fantastic. I also would love it if you could share by commenting on the show notes page or send me an email on how you’re using it. I would love to learn how you’re using it.

Henry Lopez (28:01):

That would help me. It would help others. And if it’s okay, I’ll share that with my audience as well. But how are you using it? What are some examples of where you’re leveraging AI to help you with your small business? This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me on this episode of the How of Business. I wish you the best as you start and grow and leverage AI to build a successful and profitable small business. I release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find a show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including the How of Business YouTube channel, and at my website, the How of business.com. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (28:35):

Thank you for listening to the How of Business. For more information about our coaching programs, online courses, show notes, pages, links, and other resources, please visit the how of business.com.