Making AI Your Competitive Advantage

Business Brain, the show for entrepreneurs episode 438 for Casual Friday, April 7, 2023. Greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain. Welcome back to Business Brain, the show where we take our business brains and apply them to all kinds of circumstances in our lives because we find that we're more efficient when we can apply our business brains to anything business wise, personal wise. Otherwise. Sponsors for this episode include factor@factormeals.com brain50, where you use code brain50 to get 50% off your first box of America's ready to eat meal kit. Two minutes and they're ready. We'll talk more about that in a minute. As well as Thinkific plus, where you get one month of Thinkific plus for free@thinkific.com businessbrain here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and here somewhere else on the Interwebs in the world of AI on Casual Friday, this is Shannon Jean.

It is the world of AI today. I have something to say. If this is not a casual thought, if you are not yet using AI for your life, for your business, if you haven't played with Chat GPT like I, I'm, I'm rarely going to say what I'm about to say. Pause this episode and go. Or while you're listening, sign up for the account@chat GPT&go. We've got links in the show notes for all this stuff and the reason I say this, I, I and you know, telling you to pause the show. That's really kind of bad for business here, but it's good for you. You need to learn how to use AI. Let me, let me say this. We've all over the years developed what is regarded in nerd circles as Google Fu, right? The, the a twist on Kung Fu. The idea of we've developed, each developed some skill at creating and crafting the right search query to get the right search results right. We've all got our, we've all done that. We have a lot of experience with it. Some of us are better than others, of course, but when search engines first came out, this was not a given, right? In fact, people were selling their services to craft you a query so that you could find the thing you wanted to find for your business. This literally happened. I never did it, but I've watched other cottage businesses do this.

I think you could. There are still probably a large swath of the population that doesn't grasp the most effective way to create that search query.

I agree with that for sure. Yeah, some of us are better than others. All of us, for, for all of us, that skill is becoming irrelevant. What is happening is we need to develop skill. AI foo, if you will, chat, GPT foo, if you want to brand it somehow with creating prompts. So we've got queries for search engines, prompts for AI, and the two are very, very different because there's a level of if you're too limited with a Google search query or in any search engine query, you won't get the results you want. But if you're too verbose with it, you'll wind up getting results for everything. And yeah, we can use quotes in a search query and like, you know, narrow it down to things. And those are good skills to have today. A year from now, I posit that they will be worthless or worth less because we need to craft AI queries with these chatbots that exist. And what I'm finding as I am trying and failing and experimenting and learning is the more verbose I am, the better off, the more descriptive I can be, the better off I am. And we'll talk about some examples in a little bit. But I'm finding what's great about these generative and transformative G and T in GPT chatbots is that you can transform the results you get by giving it a follow up query. So if you weren't specific enough in your first one, no worries. Just say, hey, rewrite that with X and we're going to talk about some examples. But that, that's my feeling on this. What, what are your feelings on this, Shannon?

Yeah, I think that you don't know what you don't know. And your point about learning these prompts and you may have a business, doesn't matter whether you're in the service business, if you run a plumbing, you know, business, or you're an accountant or an attorney or a landscape construction, whatever. There are ways to integrate AI into your business. Whether it's on your website, whether it's creating content for you to put on flyers. I mean, you don't know what you don't know. And the only way to learn is to start and to experiment. And if you're not the one to do it, somebody in your organization should be learning about how to do this.

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Love it.

Anyway.

Oh, no, they're great. I. I agree. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Okay, so the AI thing. So I've been doing the Macgeek Gab podcast for almost 18 years, right? And so I know that I'm stuck in my ways with that. It's just because the human brain is perfect at finding shortcuts and just developing habits and then you stick with them. And so I know that I need to write better show notes. Specifically, the blog post part of my show notes needs to be longer. I always write like a short little paragraph and I'm like, great, check the box. Moving on. Got lots of listeners. Really, we're successful, but we're not doing anything for SEO with a short little, you know, 40 blog post. Right?

Yeah.

So what I did was I took the agenda of the show, which just lists the person's name who sent in a quiet we were a Q and a show person's name who sent in the question and my written description, one liner of their topic, right? So that as I'm looking, as I'm creating the agenda and as we're doing the show, I know what's coming next. So I fed that in to chat GPT and I said write a short blog post describing how Dave John and Pilot Pete, the hosts of the show, did a podcast episode with the following agenda. And then I just pasted it in and I clicked go and it wrote me a six paragraph thing. In the latest episode of Mac, geekab figured out that it was mackiecab. By the way, our three favorite geeks, Dave John and Pilot Pete, delivered an exciting, informative podcast that touched on a variety of topics, from quick tips to detailed discussions. Episode 975 is packed with valuable information for Mac enthusiasts. The podcast started with and it on it goes. I was like, this is frigging amazing. And I read through it and I had a couple of things that I would change and did change to match my voice and style. And it doesn't know that we say don't get caught at the end of every episode. Although my guess is at some point It'll figure that out too. And, and so you know, I, I, I put things, I, there are some sort of branded phrases that it rephrased and I changed those, but that's fine. And, and that became the post, but that's not the end of it. Then I said that's great, please distill that down into 120 to 160 character SEO friendly meta description. And it wrote a pretty generic meta description. And I said that's fine, but please rephrase that meta description to remove the mention of the name of the show, Matt Geekgeb and also remove mentions of the host names, focusing instead on a few of the topics covered. And it said explore Apple tips and tricks, Safari currency conversion, finder shortcuts, Siri and more. Dive into cool tech finds and enhance your Mac experience.

That's amazing.

And this all took me, you know, a few minutes.

Yeah. So that content creation aspect of things based on something you've already created, maybe you have tips and things on your website that you could, you know, give use those prompts to have an AI write something or you know, new and updated or you could even customer Service.

Take your FAQ, feed it in and create more FAQs. Right. Or your knowledge base and create answers to questions.

Yep. So I've been using Chat GPT in to write an article about a topic we've discussed. And I put those, if you get the Business Brain newsletter, which you should sign up for at BusinessBrain show, you'll see those articles below our show notes and the chapter and all that stuff. And I was like, oh, that's great, I think that's fantastic. But now we're using, just starting to get familiar with a new tool called Swell AI that's really for kind of focused on podcasts and it goes way, way beyond specifically, you know, what we can do. All to the point of creating an ask me anything query based on the transcript of your podcast where somebody can ask a natural language question about, you know, something we talked about and it will come back and give them the answer based on the transcript.

It's crazy. Yeah. Well, I think an important thing for all of us to remember is that these are large language models, right. LLM. They're a chat based AI engine that ingests and processes this large language model, which means lots and lots of content. And then based on its knowledge of that content, and I'm using knowledge with air quotes sort of that based on its knowledge of that content, it then gives you answers. So chat GPTs if you go to OpenAI, you know, dot com, I think it's dot com, I think. Yeah. OpenAI dot com, which is where chat GPT is. That engine, that large language model is fed with most of the information from the Internet at large up through some point in 2021, meaning it is not current. So if you want to do what we all did and probably still do with Google, and do what I call ego searches or topic searches, where it's like, tell me who Dave Hamilton is. Tell me who Shannon Jean is. Tell me about Business Brain. It wouldn't know about Business Brain because we changed the name of this show in 2022. Right. So it's not going to know about that. But it does have this rich history of everything up until about two years ago that it can use if you feed it with your other stuff. So I fed it with our agenda for the show. Sometimes you could feed it with like a little transcri or something to give it context for the. For it to then regurgitate or process that if you want to do those ego searches or do something with Chat GPT. But based on current data, you can do that because Microsoft's Bing AI is Chat GPT4, which is the very latest engine that you only get if you pay for it. But with Bing, you don't have to pay yet. At least you get GPT4 plus Bing's current search database, meaning it's based on the Internet at large. I've done ego searches in both. And, you know, it's like, write a bio for Dave Hamilton the podcaster. Again, being specific enough to narrow it down so that they're not getting Dave Hamilton the baseball player, Dave Hamilton the guitar player, you know, whatever.

Yeah.

So I say write a bio for Dave Hamilton the podcaster. Chat GBT got it wrong. I mean, some parts were right, some parts were wrong. Like it said, you know, graduated from Santa Cruz or, you know, UC Santa Cruz. I didn't ever go to UC Santa Cruz. I didn't graduate from anywhere. But when I asked Bing AI, tell me about Dave Hamilton the podcaster, it got it right. Like, it was. It was all. But it was a little bit safer with its data because it has current data. It's. We need to know how these things are built to be used, to use them effectively. And that's part of the key here.

But we all need to learn how to use mistakes.

I don't just mean you, I mean all of us. Yeah. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think we were talking before the show. I know there's fear out there towards this AI and what's going to happen with all these jobs and different things. And the one thing I'll say about at least like the job market is when you eliminate large parts of employment, let's say a tool takes it over. Usually those people learn to do something else and we create entirely new industries based on that. If you look at history. So it's not always a negative.

No, it's, it's rarely is it an. It's a short term, it is a negative in the short term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like I've used, I've used Chat GPT to write code for me PHP code, you know, for a website. And it, the code that it writes is solid. There is a thing now called GitHub Copilot. GitHub being a code management repository management tool where you'd have all your code there. Copilot will write you code for your repo and it uses your existing code that you have to seed the engine so that when it's writing new stuff, it's doing it based on what you already have using variable names and function names and leveraging what you've already written. And I work with a programmer on another team. He just had it right like a thousand lines of code for him to save him a ton of time to get a framework together. It's amazing. Yeah.

I mean think about, you know, I used to talk a lot about a, a service called Help Scout which really dramatically improved the customer service experience for my customers. And you know, we would create knowledge bases and do all these kinds of things but think about it happening automatically where your customers queries are automatically turned into a knowledge based entry and data put together to answer those questions. So the next time you got that query it would automatically be answered. And you know that much faster it, it really can increase your productivity and, and the key here, and this is why we're doing this on Casual Friday, is to just get you to experiment.

With it, make mistakes. Yeah.

Play around with it. You know, talk to your kids, how are they using it at school or what's going on and, and go up and put prompts in there and just see what happens and come back and tell us and if you're not using AI, come tell us why. Business Brain FeedbackUsBrain show again FeedbackUs Business.

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