AI has been around for a while, but Chat GPT has been driving adoption among business owners. The user-friendly interface, insightful and often surprising answers have attracted entrepreneurs to see what they can do. The number of Chat GPT based products on Product Hunt has exploded and will only increase. The tools are created in their hundreds and millions of entrepreneurs use them.
Entrepreneurs aren’t taking full advantage of AI: Here’s how to think bigger
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How entrepreneurs use AI
The biggest part of AI adoption among entrepreneurs is using the tools that already exist to save time doing things they already did. Much of this is in the form of content. They use AI copywriting and image generation tools and ask Chat GPT to generate headlines and captions and even entire sales pages, series of marketing emails and calls to action. They write blog posts for SEO with the help of a robot assistant who seems to have all the answers and can put together a copy of any style in no time.
Some entrepreneurs are afraid of AI. They see it as their competition and fear that their margins and USPs will be squeezed by the technology. Comparable to the 19e century luddites of the industrial revolution who wrecked sewing machines, AI is their sworn enemy and they waste energy highlighting the obvious flaws to prove how they are better. They write policies to prevent AI from being adopted, content created, and artistic licenses granted, forgetting that humans have flaws and biases too.
A separate set of entrepreneurs have become detectives. They are concerned with figuring out what is real and what is AI generated. A friend has a content site that makes money from affiliate links and she hires copywriters to generate over a hundred articles a week. Suspecting that some of her copywriters aren’t handwriting the articles, she invests in AI plagiarism tools to get a hold of them. Academics are developing stricter methods to ensure that students do not submit essays written by AI copywriting tools.
Each of these groups lacks the potential and thinks too little about how to integrate AI into their business.
How entrepreneurs should use AI
In 2015, I watched Moley Robotics launch the prototype of its robotic kitchen. A pair of animatronic hands were trained by a chef to cut vegetables, prepare ingredients and stir pasta. He could prepare a meal for the whole family at the touch of a button and even load a dishwasher afterwards. I thought about who the winners were in this scenario, should it be widely adopted in the future. The winners: the owners of Moley Robotics, the chef whose hands were used to train the robot, and the people who consume the food and don’t have to make it themselves or pay a human to cook it for them .
Who were the losers? All other chefs whose hands were not used to train the robot and whose customers were now being looked after by the robot chef. The gap between winners and losers is huge here. So which side would you rather be on?
Entrepreneurs aren’t taking full advantage of AI: Here’s how to think bigger
The future of AI is winner takes all. But this isn’t about writing headlines and submitting fake essays, it’s about actually building the tools that billions of people will use. Adopting a winner-takes-all mindset is pointless if you are looking to make incremental changes within your existing business. The potential of AI cannot be squeezed into your human-made planning and services. Think bigger, or become superfluous.
A favorite problem-solving tool of Elon Musk is thinking about the Platonic ideal. This means, instead of integrating AI into what currently exists, think about what could be created from scratch. Imagine if nothing existed. Imagine if you didn’t have a business that worked in a set way, but a blank slate to re-imagine how to deliver the same result for your customers using AI. Thinking about what already exists will only limit your thinking and limit your results.
What is the potential of AI for companies?
Instead of a commercial law firm thinking about how AI writing tools can be used to clean up contracts and remove typos, they should think about what they can build so that their client feels safe and legally protected when running their business. Instead of a personal assistant having to worry about being out of a job once their clients realize there is an existing tool for everything they do, they can use their expertise to design the tools and create new ones that are better to work.
A personal stylist needn’t worry that Chat GPT can give their clients tailored style advice, they should think about how they can appear in every professional’s wardrobe, as the person they ask what they should wear every day . The technology makes it possible, but most entrepreneurs are fixated on the wrong things and don’t see the potential for themselves.
The potential of AI is that we coexist in harmony with it and we use it to move our lives forward. In the future, only human-generated content will simply fall into another category. In the sport of powerlifting, there are drug-tested and non-drug-tested federations. If you are not drug tested, it is assumed that you are on performance-enhancing drugs. This will be the case with AI: if you have not specifically stated that you do not use the tools, it is assumed that you do. And why wouldn’t you? Embrace what exists to spend more time doing what only your human self can do.
What’s in the future?
In the future, Chat is GPT 3.5 and 4, and a slew of alternatives, plus every tool conceived and developed into reality by visionary entrepreneurs. There is an ever widening gap between those who bury their heads in the sand and those who grab AI with both hands. Your business could be unrecognizable in a few months if you use the technology without the limitations you’ve been working with until now. Figuring out how to do this isn’t easy.
While there are benefits to using the tools that already exist, it can only mean treading water until you get caught up. While it’s an efficient strategy in the short term, it doesn’t matter if your entire industry is toppled by a few key players who thought several steps ahead. Raise your visionary thinking and make yourself one of them.