April 2023

Happy April to you all! We hope that spring is coming soon to a city near you!

This is a fun one for you! We are HOPPING (pun not intended, but it is fitting) on the ChatGPT bandwagon this month, bringing you newsletter content below not written by a person! We have been closely following some of the hot topics related to artificial intelligence, specifically this system. Other SBDCs across the country are testing the functionality and application in our field by asking AI systems to write newsletters, perform financial analysis, write business plan templates, and a multitude of other tasks. While AI can start you out with a nice template, we are finding that it can’t do it all and that our human intelligence (and our vast expertise) still gives us the advantage!

If you haven’t ventured into this realm yet, no worries! We finally tried it out this week too! To start, you need to frame the situation, the who, what, and where details. Our request was simple, we asked the chatbot in ChatGPT to “write an e-newsletter targeted to SBDC stakeholders about using ChatGPT and other AI programs in small business.” Here is exactly what it produced:

Subject: Enhance Small Business Operations with ChatGPT and AI Programs

Dear SBDC Stakeholders,

I hope this newsletter finds you doing well. As we navigate these challenging times, I want to share with you how small businesses can benefit from using ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI that can understand and generate human-like text. This technology can assist small business owners in various areas of their operations, such as marketing, customer service, and even internal communication.

Here are some ways ChatGPT and other AI programs can help small businesses:

1. 1. 1. Customer Service: Chatbots powered by AI technology can help small businesses provide 24/7 customer service without the need for additional staff. Chatbots can answer frequently asked questions, direct customers to the right information, and provide personalized recommendations based on customer data.
      2. Marketing: AI-powered tools can help small businesses create targeted marketing campaigns and analyze customer data to optimize their strategies. AI can analyze data on customer behavior, preferences, and trends, enabling businesses to create more effective campaigns and boost their ROI.
      3. Internal Communication: AI-powered assistants can streamline internal communication and help small businesses stay organized. These assistants can schedule meetings, set reminders, and even answer emails, freeing up time for small business owners to focus on other important tasks.
      4. Sales: AI-powered tools can help small businesses automate their sales processes, making it easier to manage leads and close deals. AI can analyze customer data to identify the best leads and provide personalized recommendations to increase conversions.

Overall, AI-powered technology can help small businesses improve their operations and increase their competitiveness. As an SBDC stakeholder, you have a unique opportunity to help small businesses integrate AI into their operations and grow their businesses.

If you have any questions about using ChatGPT and other AI programs in small businesses, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are here to support you and your clients in any way we can.

Thank you for your continued support, and I look forward to hearing about the successes you and your clients achieve using AI technology.

Best regards,
[Your Name]

While our question was quite basic, we were still pleasantly surprised at the answer, and it was just as fun to watch it type out on the screen in front of our eyes! If you get a chance to try it yourself or have a few minutes of downtime, we encourage you to try and stump the AI program, ask it to do something for you to make your life easier (like write your newsletter), or perform a calculation or analysis and see if it gives you what you already have, or something new!

There is certainly increased interest in this topic, and new offerings are being promoted every day to learn more about ChatGPT and AI systems. We intend to keep digging into this and learning more so that we can best serve our clients and stakeholders!

If you have another topic of interest that you think we need to learn more about or that you are predicting will impact our state’s small businesses – just drop us a line.

Thanks for reading, and happy melting!
Tiffany Ford, State Director
And all the Staff of the ND Small Business Development Network