Master Industry Research with ChatGPT: A Guide to AI-Driven Insights

Are you an accountant or bookkeeper? And perhaps you're struggling with this transition from those traditional compliance services and you want to move to lucrative advisory services. Well, you're in luck because in this video I'm going to share with you how we can use ChatGPT to deliver powerful business advisory services to our clients. I'm actually going to show you in particular a prompt that you can use. You can start using it today to carry out industry revenue research, which is really powerful. If it's an industry, a client you are meeting, you want to add value and you perhaps don't know enough about their industry. So hang tight. We're going to go through a really practical process for doing exactly that.

Welcome back. It's Mark Wickersham here and I am a huge fan of advisory services. I'm going to show you and get practical. Soon we're going to open up ChatGPT and look at a worked example. As a profession, we need to be creating more value for our clients. We need to be helping our clients build more successful business businesses, and we need to be doing that more than ever before. And the reason for that is because of this huge change taking place right Now. We're with AI with large language models like ChatGPT.

We knew nothing about ChatGPT until November 2022, when OpenAI released GPT3 to the public. And since then, the world's gone crazy with this big race for developing AI systems. And this is going to have a profound impact on you, a profound impact on the accounting profession. In fact, I did a video on my YouTube channel, a live stream in early 2024 where I gave my predictions for what is going to happen to the accounting profession in 2024 and the subsequent years. If you've not watched that, go and check that out. We'll put a link to it in that video. I share with you my reasons for suggesting why. I believe that very soon, in a very short space of time, compliance work will disappear completely. We will not be doing bookkeeping and tax returns, and we have to start doing more. But I also share in things that you can do to keep your firm future proofed, to make sure that you tap into the opportunity. And one of those is that we can start delivering more valuable services to our clients. And one of those is business advisory. So not only is it more important than ever before to deliver advisory because of the impact AI will have on our compliance services, but also because these tools make it so much easier for us to create that more value. Business advisory has never been easier than it is right now. So what we're going to do is I'm going to go into ChatGPT and we're going to go through a prompt. We'll go through it slowly because what I want to do in this session, in this video is demonstrate to you, first of all something very practical that you can start using straight away. Something that will demonstrate the power of ChatGPT and also to demonstrate some of the things we want to be thinking about when we are crafting prompts. I am a big fan of prompt engineering, which if you're not sure, that is, it's simply how we communicate with AI models. And if you've been playing around with tools like ChatGPT or with tools like Claude, or with Gemini or other large language models and you've been disappointed with some of the results that you've been getting, well, very often the reason why we, we are disappointed with the output is because the input, the questions we ask, the prompts that we create are not designed to get the best possible responses. So we'll look at some practical stuff in that area. So here we go. This is what we're going to look at in the video today. We're going to look at. Let's imagine that you have a brand new client coming in to your office tomorrow and you want to deliver some real value. You want to give them, demonstrate that you understand their industry, demonstrate that you have done some research and you want to be able to give some business insights. So one of the things we can do is carry out some research which we should do. It's a great idea. We should research our clients and understand their business better. And ChatGPT is great for that. So I'm going to use a business, it's a real business. I know nothing about the business itself. It is in the water jet cutting business. It's an engineering business. I know nothing about engineering, I know nothing about water jet cutting. Here is the business, it's a UK business and I've taken their website. So let's imagine this is my client, they are coming in for a meeting tomorrow and I want to do some preparation. So let me jump right over to ChatGPT and I have created here a prompt. It's looks a long prompt because I'm a big fan of creating prompt templates, having great prompts that we can make as templates that we can reuse over and over again. And in the case of doing research for clients, this is probably something that you will do regularly. So let's have a Great system that we can do use for that. So at the very bottom, let me start at the end of the prompt. First I have a heading called variables in the prompt. This is really powerful when we are doing prompt engineering. And my two variables are client, website and industry sector. Now the client website is the one that I've just showed you and the industry sector is the waterjet cutting engineering business. This means that you can use every aspect of the prompt I'm going to use. Show you in a second. Every single time you can use the same prompt for every client and all you have to do with the prompt is just change the these two things. What industry are they in? What's their website? That's the only information you need to add to it and you will create a report like magic in minutes. So let's go and look at the prompt and then I'm going to hit this black button here and let's ask ChatGPT for the research. Okay, so at the start, let's start off with the first sentence. You are a market research analyst skilled in analyzing industry insights to help with strategic data thinking. Okay, why is that important? One of the things we know about prompt engineering is that by default ChatGPT and other large language models play the role of a helpful assistant. But if we ask them to play a different role, in this case a market research analysis, what we have found is that we get better responses, more detailed, more nuanced answers. So that's giving ChatGPT the role to play. And by the way, this prompt I'm giving you, I'm showing you a chatgpt, you could use this in any other large language model. Okay, then we want to give it the task. What do we want it to do? Your task is to create a detailed report for a strategic planning session with a client who is in the industry sector. And that's our variable. So in this case it understands that. Now, as waterjet cutting engineering, it then says you must analyze the client website, which is what I fed it at the bottom and all linked pages to fully understand the client and the industry they operate in. So that bit of the instruction is making sure it reads all of the pages of the website using your browsing capability. Research the industry sector.

So in this case the waterjet cutting engineering industry, to identify current market trends, identify the key competitor, the latest innovations and any recent regulatory changes. And I've put there using your browsing capability, because if you don't do that, it may not use its browsing. So chatgpt sometimes will just Use whatever it's got in its knowledge base. And its knowledge base might not be right up to date. And if we want things like recent regulatory changes, we want to make sure we want to tell the model to go and use the Internet to get the very latest stuff. By the way, I am using here the most powerful model at the time of recording this, which is ChatGPT4O, which is now available for free, and it does include browsing. Okay. It then says that the report should include the following section. So now I'm giving it a template or layout of what I want to put in the report. So I want an executive summary, I want the current market trends, I want some competitor analysis, I would like some latest innovations in the waterjet cutting engineering industry and I want the latest regulatory changes. So you could change that, you could have different sections. But one of the things that's really powerful to do when you create your reports or your prompts is set out how you want it laid out. What are the key sections that you would like in there? And then finally, the report should be suitable for presenting to a client in a meeting. Using headings for each main section and bullet points for key points to make it easy to read. Include charts, graphs and tables where appropriate to enhance the presentation of data. Ensure to use reliable data sources. And then we have our variables. So that's our prompt. Okay. And I put in that I want it for this particular business, this waterjet cutting business. Let's fire up the prompt and let's see how quickly ChatGPT can do this research. Here we go. So off it goes, it's thinking, and as I scroll down, it's searching the web because I've asked it to use its browsing capability. There's a bit of a pause here whilst it goes and does that, but it's never a long. It doesn't take it long to do that. In fact, here it goes, off it goes. So here's our report. Strategic Planning for Aquajet Executive Summary. This report provides a detailed analysis of the waterjet cutting engineering sector, focusing on Aquajet, a prominent player in this industry. It covers current market trends, key competitors, latest innovations and recent regulatory changes. Our key findings indicate strong market growth driven by technological advancements and an increase in demand for precision cutting. So there's a great little introduction from it. Let's go into the detail. So, current market trends. The industry is experiencing significant growth with an expected cagr. I'm not quite sure what that is, but I could ask ChatGPT. In fact, we might do that of around 7.5% over the next five years. This growth is driven by the demand for precision cutting in industries such as aerospace, automotive and manufacturing. So that's interesting to know. I had no idea that might be useful in your conversation with the client. Advancements, innovations such as, such as multi axis cutting, improved pump technologies and automation are enhancing the efficiency and capabilities of water jet cutting systems. And there is a growing emphasis on eco friendly practices with companies like Aquajet adopting sustainable technologies that reduce energy consumption and waste. We have some competitor analysis here. The major competitors include Omax Flow International and KMT Waterjet. It tells us their market position.

We've got some strengths and weaknesses, the latest innovations in the industry, we've got some emerging technologies right now. Recent innovations include the development of 5 axis and 6 axis water jet cutting machines which allow for more complex precision cuts and so on. And then we can also see what might be some of the regulatory changes going on in the profession. So some great information there that we can use in our meeting tomorrow to demonstrate to our client that we have researched their industry. We understand their industry, we know what's happening in the industry, what's going on in the industry, what's changing. Because the more we can demonstrate to our clients that we understand them and their industry, the more that we can position ourselves as experts in their industry. And if they see you as being the accountant who is the expert in their industry, then they want to go, they want to stay with you. They won't want to move to a different firm of accountants. They want to stick with somebody who understands them and their business. Okay, we also have some recommendations coming up here. So we could invest in sustainable technologies, so continue to adopt and innovate eco friendly practices to stay ahead of regulatory requirements. We could expand market reach, exploit emerging markets where the demand for precision cutting is growing. We know where that is, it's aerospace, automotive, etc. And then we could also enhance customer support by strengthening after sales support and maintenance services to build long term customer relationships. So I don't know about you, I think that's a great report as a starting point. And that took how long did that really take? It took as long as it would have taken to cut and paste a standard prompt, add in the website, add in the business and it probably took less than 60 seconds to produce that. It was super fast and we've got a great starting point and that might be sufficient for your needs. But of course one of the great things about large language models and ChatGPT is, is we can then ask follow up questions. In fact, one of the things we could do is and I don't know if you're aware of this inside ChatGPT, but if you were to highlight a section, I'm just going to highlight this bit here. You get some speech marks and if I click on that and hit reply, it now knows I'm talking about that. And I can now say explain.

If I could type right, explain what CAGR is because I'm not sure. Let's see.

Perhaps you know. Perhaps you know. So anyway, we've got a bit of a pause here. It's thinking about it. It's compound annual growth. Of course it would be compound annual growth rate. Okay. It's now come with a formula and so much more stuff. Right? That is one example of how we could use ChatGPT to help us with business advisory to do research and analysis of our clients. If you find this, if you found this valuable, please hit that thumbs up button, Please like the button. You'll also find more videos on my channel. I'll be posting more videos about practical use cases for ChatGPT in the accounting profession. So watch out for those. And also I'll put some links below to some resources that you can grab because you might want to learn some more about this stuff. If you do, grab some of those resources and I will see you again on another video. Bye for now.