Is it Practical to Use ChatGPT-4 in a Business Setting?
The short answer is yes. ChatGPT is not only practical, but incredibly useful in a business setting. When ChatGPT-3.5 first burst on the scene in December 2022, my team and I embraced it readily and found lots of great uses. When given the opportunity to sign up for the paid ChatGPT Pro version, my partner Neelesh and I both independently signed up because we were using the tool daily. So naturally we excitedly put ChatGPT version 4 through its paces once it launched on March 14, 2023. We want to share our practical uses of this new and powerful generative AI tool.
4 Practical Ways to Use ChatGPT-4 for Businesses Use
1. Ideation
Ideation is a highly underrated way to use ChatGPT for business purposes. ChatGPT is a very powerful tool that can help give ideas you may have not considered or found from a standard internet search.
Ideation is made easy due to the fact that ChatGPT seems to prioritize giving lists. Even if you prompt it like “which vendor is the best…” it will demure and give you a list of top choices. If you ask for a single suggestion on what to do next, it often will respond with a range of choices in a list. We prefer to just embrace this tendency and leverage the tool to get a list and then start forcing 1:1 contrasts of one option vs. another. In response, you will get yet another list, but we see this as providing more ways to continue to explore and probe for answers.
Pro-Tip
ChatGPT is bringing back the fun of discovery again, like in the early days when Google or Wikipedia came out and these fresh new tools helped to broaden vs. narrow your horizons. We find that leaning into the style of the AI tool allows us to be curious again, enjoying seeing where technology can take us.
We’re so pleased with what OpenAI has built and released for general use. ChatGPT continues to help us arc over gaps and initiate action that are taking us in new directions. The future is definitely brighter in our estimation thanks to the practical power of these tools to enable us to reach further and with more enthusiasm than ever before. Traditional web search still has its place and hopefully we’ll see Microsoft Bing.com optimally integrate ChatGPT in safe and supportive ways, just like Google will integrate Bard (their AI generative language tool). We are definitely at an inflection point in our society’s use of technology, and here at Net Friends we are embracing it and leveraging it to the hilt.
2. Business Process Formation
Another practical use for ChatGPT in a business setting is process formation. We found that general business processes could be readily drafted with minimal prompting and refinements. Naturally the processes were generic and had to be adapted and customized, but they were thorough and consistently provided an excellent starting point. The earlier version of the chat did not handle this well for us, but ChatGPT version 4 does a fine job.
Do attempt to get the tool to generate the same general business process more than once in a new chat session. We found that the generative language model produced surprisingly different results with very subtle changes in the way you prompt the chat tool. This allows you to get two drafts of the same process to work with, which we found helpful. Again, you have to continue working on customizing these processes outside of the ChatGPT interface, but it gives you a significant head start and is a real time saver.
3. Meeting Summaries
One of the best ways to use ChatGPT for business is to create meeting summaries. Since you can feed something like 10,000 words into the interface, I regularly would take meeting notes that either I took or that came from others on my team and prompt the tool to summarize the notes and provide key takeaways or action items. The results were excellent.
Pro-Tip
By June 2023, Teams Premium should have this function built into it. Then we can potentially move away from typing out notes during or immediately after a meeting and just rely more on the meeting transcript and be “hands free” during meetings so everyone can fully focus on the discussion at hand. I’m pretty sure that by the end of 2023, every major meeting platform will have some form of AI-powered meeting summary and key takeaways automation feature. It might be a premium or paid feature, but this is such a value-add for most businesses with the amount of time we all spend in meetings.
4. Image Awareness
We can now prompt ChatGPT with suggestions to look at specific design suggestions that reference a logo or image on a website (so long as that image and website were present prior to September 2021). We tried out simple prompts like “Recommend design options for the Net Friends logo” and more sophisticated prompts to ask for one or more images to be used as “inspiration” for various designs. The tool did a terrific job with vivid descriptions and something that we could readily begin workshopping as a graphic design. We feel that this in particular could be incredibly helpful, especially for small businesses that may not have a dedicated design team or are simply looking for a fresh perspective on their branding.
Pro-Tip
Do NOT try to take these vivid descriptions to the companion image generator DALL-E 2. It was shockingly bad at generating graphics that were useful in conveying business concepts, infographics, logos, or other typical design work that a business might use or consume.
