A consistent challenge for small business owners is trying to do it alone. Even for SMBs that employ a small team, the bulk of responsibility for the business’s success or failure will always fall on the owner. Small business owners are expected to take care of tasks both large and small – and hiring an assistant to help carry the load simply isn’t an option for many SMBs.

That’s where AI comes in. Currently, AI is both being oversold and undersold. It varies from being a victim of hype, a source of fear, and a treasure trove of unrealized potential. It is sometimes promoted as a cure-all or sold short as just a curiosity, but the truth is that AI can be exceptionally useful for small business owners looking to grow online. It can’t solve all business problems overnight, but what it can do is ease the process of solving them. You can think of AI less as an instant fix for perfecting an online presence and more as a tool to help you refine that presence.

Perhaps the best way to describe AI is as a multiplier. It takes human efforts and expands on them, bringing more innovation, more creativity, more problem solving and more personalization to the equation. Historically, only the largest companies had the ability to leverage AI as a multiplier, but new tools empower small business owners and side hustlers to access that multiplier effect.

As an example, let’s discuss the current premier AI platform: ChatGPT.

ChatGPT: Uses and Limitations

It could be argued that no AI model, platform, or tool has ever generated as much interest as ChatGPT. Perhaps not even IBM’s Watson’s Jeopardy! victory broadcast in 2011 captured the world’s interest so broadly. A big part of that is ChatGPT’s public availability, a factor that benefits both the end user and the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI.

Small businesses are already using ChatGPT to drive their success. From producing new website content to creating marketing campaigns to developing the foundational concepts of a business, ChatGPT can be a strong partner for small business owners whose aspirations exceed their time and resources.

While the ceiling is high for what a motivated and diligent small business owner can accomplish with ChatGPT, the platform does have its limitations, many of which are common to AI implementations across this rapidly growing industry.

Its first and perhaps most significant limitation is that it doesn’t replace human judgment and logic. It can give you a plan for bringing an idea to life, it can structure that plan and break it into steps, it can even give you recommendations to improve that plan, but it can’t tell you if your plan is fundamentally sound and whether you can deliver on it. It does a good job with structure, but it’s important not to slip into believing that it understands the content within the frameworks it creates. For example, you might ask ChatGPT to create a game scenario for you with rules and objectives. The rules and objectives might end up being logically sound, or they might not; structurally, they will be coherent, but whether the game is one anyone will want to play and whether the rules and objectives make sense is something the user will have to determine.

That ties into ChatGPT’s second limitation: It doesn’t do the work for you. Even written content, an area ChatGPT excels in, will need a human touch in order to be great. ChatGPT doesn’t make it so that people never have to work again; it simply accelerates work and provides quality-of-life improvements to existing processes.

Finally, it is important to remember that ChatGPT is only as good as the data included in the model. It is not inventing entirely new information and ideas; it is using data pulled into the model to give people what they ask for.

With all of that said, if you think of ChatGPT as a means of accelerating and bolstering creative ideas and business concepts, you will start to see past see past these limitations and envision the many potential use cases. Let’s explore a few examples.

AI Uses Cases and Examples for SMBs

Below are a few examples of how ChatGPT and other generative AI tools can support SMB efforts. We’ve included screenshots of the generated content and the specific prompts used to generate that content below.

Prompt #1: Help Me Come Up With a Small Business Idea

“Come up with a Small Business idea for Main Street USA with a physical and online presence. Looking for an idea that can scale online but deliver value to locals who are close to the physical store.”

Prompt #2: Help Confirm the Idea is Sound

“I need help deciding if creating a Small Business idea around a Local Experience Hub which aims to bring the best of the local community to both online and offline customers. It’s a one-stop destination where customers can experience and purchase local products, attend workshops, and participate in community events, all while connecting with the local culture and supporting local businesses. Is this a good idea, and if yes, what research can you provide that helps validate.”

Prompt #3: Help Build Out the Customer Experience

“Based on this Local Experience Hub concept we have discussed, can you provide a mock design on how we should think about setting up the experience both in the store and online.”

Prompt #4: Help With Brand Design Concepts*

“Create a Brand Logo Design for a brand called LocaleX (Locale + Experience): Combining “local” and “experience,” this name suggests a unique and immersive journey into the local community with curated local products, workshops and class and community events.”

*This prompt utilized a non-ChatGPT tool. Readers can search for ‘generative AI’ and find many tools in this category.

Prompt #5: Help Create Brand Content

“Create a tweet for my new Local Experience Hub to announce the grand opening.”

“You are a professional Press Release company that writes engaging and action-focused Press Releases for Small Business. Please create a creative, fun, and engaging Press Release for my new small business brand, LocaleX.”

Prompt #6: Help Establish a Marketing Plan

“You are an experienced Marketing Agency supporting Small Business – create a marketing plan with paid, owned, and earned strategies and a monthly budget of $500 USD.”

Making the Most of Your AI Business Partner

As you can see from the examples above, AI will not do everything for people, but what it will do is multiply efforts and make time-consuming tasks a little easier to manage. When treated not as a cure-all but as a force multiplier, AI can be a strong partner for small business owners looking to accelerate success and gain an edge over the competition.

If SMBs haven’t started using AI yet, now is the perfect time to dive in. Explore the available tools and, if possible, find ones that integrate with the overall website experience and online solutions suite. Before long, SMBs will see AI as a true partner supporting business’s growth.