3 entrepreneurs on how they’re using ChatGPT to propel their business

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll know the hottest topic of the year to date has been the emergence and success of new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, a simulated chatbot with the potential to revolutionise business.

ChatGPT is a cutting-edge language generation model developed by OpenAI. It uses artificial intelligence algorithms to generate human-like text based on a wide range of prompts. Furthermore, the technology learns from the vast amounts of text it has been trained on, so improving its performance and accuracy over time.

Ask and it shall deliver, from “re-write this to sound more formal” to “build me a multiple-choice test based on this technical manual” – are a few use cases we’ve heard.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs has reported artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, but could also spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by seven per cent over a ten-year period.

While Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft race to dominate AI – we spoke to some business owners about how the technology is helping them re-write code, cross-reference translation tools to increase language accuracy, re-write instructions from complex technical manuals for customers in layman’s terms, and more.

How 3 entrepreneurs are using ChatGPT to boost their business

To better understand how you can use ChatGPT for your business, three members of Entrepreneurs’ Organisation (EO), who are actively using AI to transform how they do business, shared their valuable insights with us.

Darryl Dillon-Shallard, Chief Experience Officer managing AI at Butterfly

“We are using AI tools to reduce the cost of ownership for websites to save our clients money, such as in AI-powered upgrades.

“We started using ChatGPT around six months ago. What we’ve been using it for mostly is to assist with any mundane, time-consuming tasks, so we can speed those up and move on to more productive tasks, which has been effective. For example, we’ve started getting transcripts of our video meetings summarised by the AI, so that instead of someone that’s been in the meeting who is just taking notes, we can automate it and even ask the AI to pull out all the action items. It’s not perfect and still needs someone to review it, but it is saving about 80 per cent of the time that would have otherwise been spent.

“Accessibility is another key use; we are using the technology to ensure that websites are accessible to all users and meet the WCAG guidelines. There’s some great automation and AI that scans our websites and picks up anything that may not be accessible to someone who is using a screen reader, for example.

“We also have developers looking at AI that helps write code quicker. Typically, our software engineers would write some code and then have another software engineer review it. What we’re trialling at the moment is getting the AI to review the code as well.

“There are some really interesting technologies coming out. One thing I do want to mention is that I want to see AI being used as a system that allows us to become more human. I want to see AI used in a way where if we’re saving some time in one area – how can we use that time to then enrich people’s lives? Can that time now be spent learning a new topic or skill, meditating or spending time with family? How can we use AI to improve us as a species to become better humans, not more machine-like?

“What the AI is doing is just making a summary of everything that’s happened before. AI is just a tool – going to a copywriter and getting them to write original copy is always going to be better than regurgitated content.”

Carlo Santoro, founder and CEO of RetailCare

“The momentum of ChatGPT since November last year has been huge. Within Entrepreneurs’ Organisation (Melbourne), we have a ChatGPT Whatsapp group which started to fire up around November, with many members getting deep into experimenting with the new AI .

“I got 25 entrepreneurs to join me for lunch in the city and we said, no one is an expert, we’re all learning, and we gathered to discuss how we are using it in our businesses and the potential future uses of the technology. We now have a global ChatGPT group with more than a thousand of the world’s top entrepreneurs sharing ideas and use. We’re on the bleeding edge, and as entrepreneurs, we’re getting in there and using it and really doing things with it – not just talking about it.

“We’re using it in our software development teams to build code. We have two people employed now just to use ChatGPT, which is plugged into our development program which then reviews all the human-coded lines and cleans it up, improves it, and reduces it from ten lines to two lines, for example. It is unbelievable and hugely successful from this perspective.

“We’re also using it for documentation and playbook (manual) writing. We’re using ChatGPT to create more intelligent documents.

“That’s the other big area we’re using it for – humanising our support communications. We have a couple of thousand support lanes here in Australia in retail, and 300 lanes across the U.S. We have a whole lot of technological manuals online that our clients can access and read themselves, but often they don’t. So we use ChatGPT for any non-urgent support tickets, to write out responses – which are very technical – but then humanise them. We are asking ChatGPT to re-write the information from technical manuals for them in layman’s terms, saving us an immense amount of time in our script-writing. I’d guess we’re closing more tickets by 50 per cent because of this, making our team smarter and our clients happier.

“The last area is the leadership team. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can use ChatGPT here and I think it comes back to clarity and comprehension of our mission, vision and values – using ChatGPT to humanise the language for the team and then taking that to our wider team, to bring that culture alive through the language.”

Costa Vasili, founder and CEO of Ethnolink and Entrepreneurs’ Organisation Melbourne Communications Chair

“We are in the language business, so it’s huge for us! We’re very much at the exploration stage and we’re testing different use cases within the translation industry.

“Some of the ways we’re using AI tools like ChatGPT are to build glossaries for non-confidential translation projects, to re-write content so it sounds more fluent, to check translation terminology, and to compare raw machine translation engine outputs.

“There’s a tool we’ve been testing, which is a machine translation aggregator. How it works is you put in the English text and choose your target language – for example, Arabic – and it will translate the text using different machine translation engines such as Google, Amazon, DeepL and ModernMT. It will then do a comparison of the machine translations using ChatGPT, and tell you what the differences between them are, and which of them it thinks is the most accurate and why.

“Organisations need to ensure that they do not knowingly or unknowingly disclose their own or their client’s confidential information, as ChatGPT stores this information on their servers and is using it to improve their service.

“The opportunities are endless in our industry and I’m 100 per cent certain that suppliers who lean into the use of AI are the ones who will benefit from it. Translation companies who refuse to lean in will be the ones that struggle the most.

“Work that can be performed by a machine at a more productive capacity and better quality will be done by a machine, and the role of people working in the translation industry – which includes project managers, quality managers, translators, proof-readers and copywriters – will turn towards using their skills and knowledge in ways within that process which may involve interacting with the machine. The role of a translator, in my view, will become more of a cultural advisor, and someone who understands two different cultures and mediates between specific language nuances that arise.

“I would say the translation industry is probably one of the best industries in terms of being prepared for technological change, because we’ve had decades of technological change. It started with the introduction of computer-assisted translation tools and then the introduction of machine translation technology, which has increasingly changed the role of a translator.

“It increases productivity, which helps bring prices down for consumers. It is also about expanding the market, such as reducing costs so more businesses can access translation services and expand into more countries.

“There is a concept of singularity within translation where a machine’s performance exceeds a human’s performance in terms of accuracy and quality. We’re not there yet, but there is data that has been looking at this concept over years and we can see that the quality has improved year on year – and eventually, the hypothesis is that we will reach a point of singularity. At the moment humans still have a very significant role to play; it’s just that we need to change our thinking about how we work with technology within the translation industry.”

For more practical hints and tips on how you can use ChatGPT in your business, check out our free webinar with The Digital Guide, Tracy Sheen.

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