4 Practical Generative AI Tools to Enhance Small Businesses
ChatGPT showed us how whole industries could be fundamentally altered by the smart use of generative AI. While the first to experience this shift were artists and graphic designers, small business owners and managers were quick to catch up and notice the potential of the newest technology trend.
Generative AI is all the rage in the IT industry. There's hardly anyone with Internet access who hasn't stumbled upon the term. But what is generative AI? And what is the difference between generative AI vs AI that we used to know?
Let generative AI speak for itself! After all, generative AI has a complete product as a result of its hard work, an article about itself included. That is also the main difference between generative AI and regular AI. Do you begin to see the possibilities?
Small businesses, as a rule, have more limited resources than their bigger counterparts. Where large companies can afford to have creative teams, marketing departments, and outsourced work, small businesses either struggle or need to get a bit more creative. Enter generative AI for small businesses!
Generative AI provides fresh ideas for inspiration, new paths to finalizing a project, and a means to accomplish both of these faster, an invaluable aid to small businesses. Let's see how!
AI Art Generators (DALL-E, Midjourney)
Obtaining graphics and art for various purposes is especially tough for small businesses. With limited manpower and budget, well, unless your small business is an art shop, getting them requires a substantial sum most of the time.
Until AI art generators gained traction last year, that is.
Generative AIs, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, completely changed the game, especially for small businesses. For a tiny part of the usual costs (or even free), any of these can act as an AI art generator for an Etsy shop, a source of ideas, complete illustrations, logos, along with so much more, and in various styles, designs, and sizes, too.
Needless to say, the quality of AI-generated art is superb, to the point of being indistinguishable from art made by humans. No corners cut! Except for the money saved, but hey, that doesn't count, right?
The applications are virtually endless. I'll skip the obvious ones that you can already guess and cut straight to the interesting part.
Midjourney, the GPT3-powered AI art generator, found use in an Australian design practice Gray Puksand and 40 staff members use it to help them visualize designs and develop new ideas. By providing textual input with instructions on the building or room design, such as "a 100-person office space with desks, focus rooms, meetings rooms and board rooms, plus plants and lots of light", Midjourney can depict it in detail, which can help direct further design development.
If designers can use it this way, why not bakers, furniture makers, or florists? Imagination is the limit!
AI Text Generators (ChatGPT, Jasper, copy.ai)
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched in November 2022 when it enchanted the Internet with its jaw-dropping text-generating skills.
This Conversational Language Generation Model is capable of writing just about anything. Blog posts? Check. Full essays? Check. Cover letter and resumes? Yup. From song lyrics to drafts of legal contracts, ChatGPT can do it in minutes. Even programmers use it to write and explain code and create websites.
All in a conversational tone that is easy to follow. Except for the code, but you get the idea.
Businesses of every size use it, but it is especially suitable for small businesses due to its versatility and low costs. How can small businesses utilize it?
For example, content creation. Content is a dominant marketing aspect of every branch of business. Except that now you don't need a content creator. ChatGPT relies on specific instructions to write blog posts, copies, and emails. Besides the all-round ChatGPT, you also have AI content creators such as copy.ai and Jasper that go into more details, but you can't really chat with them.
Henry Williams, from The Guardian, tested ChatGPT and discovered that AI-generated an article that he would charge $600 for in just 30 seconds! Some minor editing was required, but the gist was there. Don't tell the rest of the Skippet team any of this, though - I am rather fond of my job…
Chatbots and Voice Assistants (PolyAI)
Leveraging a sizable team of human voice assistants to handle tickets, issues, and troubleshooting in a small-size business is, needless to say, out of the question.
Thank goodness we have generative AI!
PolyAI is a service that understands the information presented to it in the call. This is made possible by feeding an enormous number of conversations in different languages and accents, which makes PolyAI quite adept at conversing with our fellow humans.
PolyAI works best when you delegate more mundane tasks to it and leave the tougher ones to a human assistant. When applied correctly, you can drastically reduce logistics costs and boost your company's customer experience and service quality, no matter the size or type of business you manage.
Brainstorming, Ideas, and Research Assistance (ChatGPT, Hebbia)
The Internet is a space that is rapidly expanding, and finding the necessary answer or information can sometimes rob you of many hours.
Yes, you can always Google it, but Google doesn't provide answers, it provides *links*. Scrolling through these for relevant information can take ages of your productive time.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, is more than willing to lend you a hand. Well, information, to be more precise. We have already praised its conversational tone earlier in the article, but here is its moment to shine since it can answer in a conversational tone about some pretty complex matters. It can even do philosophy!
Hebbia is another example of an AI search engine done smartly. From extensive market research to something rather specific, this AI analyst understands your queries and delivers relevant results. It claims to be 10 times faster and 10 times more accurate than the conventional search methods. I didn't measure it, but it does things faster by far. Which is enough for me.
Boost Your Business with Generative AI
From better efficiency to outright new solutions, generative AI can elevate your work to new heights in terms of productivity and quality of service. Small businesses deserve that, as AI is there to help them as well.
Do you think you might be in need of AI assistance as well? Could your personal and business actions and habits be more streamlined and optimized? Skippet can help you with that.
Stuck with logistics, such as handling projects, bills, and timetables? Just tell Skippet, and it'll make you a custom app, no coding required, tailored to your specific needs.
Eager to try it or interested to find out more? Our beta launch is just about here – join our waitlist now, and we’ll let you know as soon as it hits.
