ChatGPT is the word on the street at the moment, and receiving an incredible amount of attention and hype. It’s the latest in a series of AI tools, or AI-driven services, that are steadily working their way into mainstream life.
“Most people use AI every day without realising it,” says Euphoria Telecom CTO Nic Laschinger. “Your Spotify playlist suggestions, Google Maps directions, or the Facebook algorithm that decides what content to show you – these are all examples of AI in action.”
While AI may seem scary, it’s also incredibly useful, and not just to show you the best way around load shedding traffic jams. AI tools can save SMEs time and effort, and even make them money, if used correctly. Below, Laschinger highlights several things that AI tools can do for SMEs.
* Writing – A number of AI tools exist to help you write, edit and refine content for blogs, newsletters, Google Ads, LinkedIn posts, and more. In other words, the kind of writing most smaller business owners have to do themselves, and struggle with. These include Neuroflash, Quillbot and Simplified, which will help you write and rewrite long form pieces like blogs or website pages, and short form copy, like social media posts, ad copy etc. Text editors like Hemingway will analyse your text for readability and show where you can improve it. Grammarly will help with spelling, grammar, clarity as well as detecting plagiarism (yours or someone else’s). An app like Coschedule will help you refine your headline to make sure you’re hitting the mark.
* Selling – Tools that help your sales teams include CRMs and sales chatbots. On the CRM side, apps like Hubspot and Salesforce, use AI-powered analytics and ML to help understand customer behaviour, predict sales trends, track customer engagement and manage sales data (amongst other things). Sales chatbots, like Hubspot Chatbot Builder, Salesforce Einstein and Drift, can help sales teams qualify leads and book meetings.
* Research – With the massive volume of material used to train this AI chatbot, ChatGPT is an incredibly comprehensive information source. While we wouldn’t necessarily trust it to write our press material, we have found it very useful for research.
We asked, “how many mobile phones are there in South Africa?” and it came back with a comprehensive, useful answer, plus links to sources. This makes it easy to verify, and search for further data should you need it.
This research capability is helpful if you’re looking to find new markets, create sales enablement material, draft presentations or write content for your blog and other channels. If you need post 2021 research however, you’ll have to stick to your usual sources as its training data doesn’t include 2022 onwards at this stage.
This is just a small sample of the AI tools available today, with more coming online almost daily. Many of these tools are available free, or at price points that make them viable options even for smaller businesses in South Africa. Once you start looking into it you might be surprised to find just what AI can do for you.