Five implications of using ChatGPT for business, according to a panel of SME leaders

A couple of times a decade we come across a steamroller trend — something that blows away what was done before and changes the game. Some of the steamroller trends we’ve seen include ‘the internet’, mobility, cloud … and now ChatGPT.

In our most recent wave of interviews with SMEs at Cameron Research, it was striking not only the level of awareness of ChatGPT, but how much SMEs are already using it in their business. It isn’t just fluff or hype — they’re seriously using it in a big way. Some of the words used by SMEs to describe it include: ‘massive’, ‘incredible’, ‘huge’, ‘amazing’, ‘I love it’, ‘pretty bloody good’, ‘a big time saver’, ‘quality is so high’, and ‘bloody brilliant’.

One of our businesses with seven full-time employees (FTEs) suggested that it will ‘probably remove two-to-three roles from this company within three years’.

In context, they said it isn’t foolproof – but it does a lot of the grunt work. One summed it up by saying: ‘we just never start with a blank piece of paper anymore’.

Consider some of their comments/user cases. Our real estate agent is a pearler …

1. For ideation and reviews

“We’re using it HEAPS in our business. We hadn’t even heard of it 6 months ago and now we’re using it everywhere … We use it to do all of our property copy – it prepares the content for the marketing and social media – and then they clean it up in the Philippines office and then we place the material from our office here … Our finance team has used it to rewrite all of our debt-collection letters, it’s incredible how many people here use it … I’ve used it just recently myself when I wanted to write a positive review of a Qantas flight attendant and I didn’t have time to write it so I put 4 dot points into it and told it to write a 300-word review. It was pretty bloody good too.” — Real Estate Agent, 65 FTEs

“I love it. Love it … We’ve developed a ChatGPT policy – it’s important from a privacy perspective, it’s ‘Open AI’ so other engineers can watch what we type in, so there’s a risk of leakage – we’re not blocking access, just desensitising our information – if it’s okay for a public forum then it’s okay for ChatGPT … But I think it’s magnificent, we just never start with a blank piece of paper anymore, it’s great for ideation … It’s great for speeches and crafting those emails that require 30 minutes thought that you can do in 10 minutes now … And you can give it examples of what you want it to understand, so it’s almost as though you can teach it, so it adapts to you a bit.” — AI Consulting, 170 FTEs

2. Social media copy

“75% of our social media posts are generated from ChatGPT.  Like for the bike shop we’ve just started, we type in ‘write an Instagram caption on a weekend bike ride around the Adelaide Hills, starting at 6am on a Saturday – 300 words’.  It writes it!  It’s unbelievable … For our hospo venues, there’s a girl in the office responsible for 8 insta accounts and instead of her having to come up with all the captions and wording for the posts, that’s ChatGPT – she’d be saving 80% of the time she was spending before.  (Laughing … ) It’s just massive.” (Hospitality venues, 50 FTEs, 200 PT/Casuals)

3. Needs oversight, but ‘huge’

“It’s massive.  It’s incredible.  We’ve developed a ‘proof of concept’ of what we can use. Basically we’ve just used the chat engine for internal customer service purposes but we’ve not used it to instruct staff, write emails or whatever – yet – but I’ve dedicated hours to it and the scope is enormous. It will probably remove 2-3 roles from this company within 3 years … It’s a long way off dependable and stand-alone, you could go too far with it, it still needs oversight – but it’s going to be huge for us.” — Import/Wholesale/Retail swimwear, 7 FTEs

“It’s an amazingly powerful transition for business. You can draw on just so much information and it puts it out there so well — it’s not perfect but it’s 80% there … so you need to fact-check it but it’s certainly an engine of grunt … Where this will get REALLY interesting is in the graphical stuff — i.e. ‘I want a 3-bedroom 2-bathroom house with north sun and a pool’ or whatever — and BOOM — there it is.” — Payments FinTech, 12 FTEs

4. Saves time and resources

“We use it heaps. We’ve integrated it into our app as a chatbot and set parameters around it. I also use it for tasks that can take me a while to do that can be automated. For example, I upload daily motivational style information like songs and quotes, so I’ll use ChatGPT for that … it’s a big time-saver for me.” — Health & fitness app, 6 FTEs

“I love it! I use it mostly for inspiration when I’ve hit a dead-end when I’m writing content, proposals and even emails. It helps provoke new ideas which speeds up the process. It doesn’t work so well though as a way of generating a finished product — it still comes off a little bit generic. There’s definitely a bit of the human element that’s still missing.” — Co-working space, 3 FTEs

…But threatens livelihoods

One of our panellists — a copywriter — can see that ChatGPT could be terrible for her business:

“Business always goes quiet in December/January but it didn’t pick up afterwards like it normally does. ChatGPT hasn’t helped — who needs a writer when you’ve got that? Things got a bit hairy there for a while and I’ve got lots of question marks all over the place.” — Copywriter, Sole trader

Conclusion

SMEs can be quick to adopt a new way of working if it is clearly superior to what they were doing before. ChatGPT has captured the SME market by storm.

Ross Cameron is the owner of Cameron Research, which first published this article.