I’m used to seeing articles about AI being used for either highly scientific uses or for generating semi-entertaining nonsense. For a personal business involving managing appointments, documenting meetings, tracking payments etc, can AI help with any of that? Other things include undertaking CPD training, occasional advertising as well as maintaining a website from time-to-time.
The people I know who don’t think AI has any use for them belong in this category and work in the area of mental health, yoga teaching / training, nursing and massage therapy.
AI is best used for creativity. It’s not precise, and it should not be relied upon for executing important tasks.
My advice for a small business owner would en to use AI to bounce ideas off of. Ask it for new ideas. Tell it things about your business, the situation, and ask it for potential threats to your model, or potential improvements to your process.
But treat it as a consultant. Meaning you are still the decision-maker, and it’s your job to evaluate its ideas.
It’s creative and highly error-prone. So it’s good for brainstorming. Not good for precision planning or execution.
If you tell me what line of business you’re in, I can provide you with some ideas about how I would use AI to help with that business.
Some things I have used AI (ChatGPT 4) for:
- I ask it questions about how to use specific software tools and libraries
- I had it develop a plan for dealing with mold in my apartment (since the mold itself was making it hard to think)
- I describe a concept and ask if there’s a term for that concept. This helps me find online discussions by humans about that topic. I trust humans for accurate information, use AI to help me find the search terms
I wouldn’t wish mold expousure on anybody. I hope you make a full recovery.
Those are good suggestions, thank you. I’ll likely be retiring soon but the people I’m thinking of are some psychotherapists I know. It’s very interpersonal and thankfully a relatively no-nonsense profession. They don’t want technology between themselves and their clients, that’s for certain.
Yes of course it can help you. The lack of imagination in this thread is truly astounding.
You have an assistant with you that can instantly answer your questions and help you develop your business:
- “what’s the most efficient way to track appointments for me on Linux desktop program with minimal budget and I have 4-6 daily appointments. My key features are reminder 30min before appointment and ability to put notes for each appointment”
- “help me optimize my meeting structure. I’m in X niche and currently I have 30minute daily meetings that don’t follow any structure, what are some de facto meeting structures and post meeting operations in this industry?”
I’m not directing this at OP but to all of the naysayers in this thread - if you can’t find use for a tireless, 20$/mo assistant that will instantly answer your questions then you should not be owning any business or leading anything for that matter.
From your examples I suppose you’re saying that something like ChatGPT might help with planning, examining processes for optimisation or making long-term choices rather than day-to-day tasks.
I disagree with you that people don’t belong in business if they don’t see value in AI. I know someone who cleans for a living. They get enough work from the business directory and the system they have seems to be simple enough already to be a candidate for optimisation.
Eh, it’s the same thing. If LLM can help me design a better process for my day-to-day tasks even if it’s not part of the process literally it’s still part of the process. Just like any growth like reading a book is part of the business process.
Not even going to touch your second paragraph and it’s completely unrelated. Cleaning for a living is not “running a small business”.
Stay as far away from it as possible. Let your competitors waste their time/money/effort buying into scams. When the bubble pops, you won’t have lost your shirt the way those of your compeditors who did fall for it did.
Honestly, I don’t think it can in any meaningful way.
LLM are regurgitation machines prone to hallucination. Other tools exist for business management which are more suited for a sole trader.
Thank you. That doesn’t surprise me, but with all the hype I wondered if I was missing something.
My company uses an LLM to summarize a report. Basically give it all the data and tell it what normal looks like so it can write stuff like “26,000 users this month, a minor decrease from last month. This is not an issue as it is within normal bounds.”
I don’t see the point, but management felt we had to put AI in SOMETHING so other companies don’t have a marketing advantage.
We’ve been working on anomaly detection for a while with Machine Learning, which is really more impressive but much harder.
AI right now is in that phase where we find out how to improve it and where to use it. It will be useful somewhere in the next 5 years, but not now. And I don’t even know if it will ever be useful in finance. We’ll see. Now is not the time.
The only reason to use it rn is if you’re a scientist or an enthusiast. You are neither I’d assume.
