💡 10 Ways to Use AI for Your Small Business (Issue 135)

Some quick tips for leveraging AI services

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m not a Luddite. 😂 I’ve been called that when I urge caution about using AI for absolutely EVERYTHING.

Personally, I worry about losing my cognitive edge if I lean on AI tools too frequently and too heavily. For example, people seem to have already lost some of their abilities to think and write.

“Our findings reveal that while LLM assistance can provide short-term boosts in creativity during assisted tasks, it may inadvertently hinder independent creative performance when users work without assistance, raising concerns about the long-term impact on human creativity and cognition.” (source)

However, a tool is a tool; I can’t deny that AI is here to stay. When personal computers first hit the scene, people thought they were just for nerds, hobbyists, and business employees. Now, approximately 94% of U.S. households own at least one computer, compared to only about 8% of households having a computer in 1984.

In the 1990s, many people didn’t understand what the “internet” was, let alone why they would want to use it. I remember the first time I used the Mosaic web browser and realized I was looking at a webpage hosted somewhere else. Pretty wild! Again, a lot of folks saw the internet as a fad or something only nerds would use. They certainly didn’t like the idea of entering a credit card number and shopping! Now look at us. We spend most of our days using the internet from a tiny computer we keep in our pockets.

So, I’m learning to use AI, especially for tasks that no other technology seems to support very well or requires several tedious steps and lots of time. I’m still careful about becoming too dependent on it for every task. But if you don’t learn more about AI and use it, you will be left behind.

---

10 Ways I’m Using AI for My Business

Below are the ways I’m currently using AI for my solopreneur business. I tend to use a few services the most often (list below). I also focus on services that either have a free tier or let you try it for free without entering a credit card. It’s always a good idea to test various services and see which of them yield the best results for you and your business.

• ChatGPT and custom GPTs (e.g., Marketing)

• Grammarly (yes, they incorporate AI now)

• Perplexity

• Claude

• Bench (it’s in private preview now)

Do you have a great way you’re leveraging AI tools? Please leave a comment and share that tip with us! Okay, here’s my list:

1. Extracting text from handwritten notes

   1. I recently took a photo of a page in my journal and asked ChatGPT to generate accurate text to copy and paste into a note on my phone. It worked surprisingly well, despite my weird handwriting!

   2. I’m sure this would also work well for whiteboard notes, but I have done little of that since leaving the corporate world.

2. Researching customer wants and needs

   1. I used a very detailed prompt to describe my ideal customer and asked ChatGPT what this customer wanted and needed most related to the coaching services I provide. The response made sense, and some details were enlightening about what they want vs. don’t want.

   2. Note: Doing this does not replace the need to talk with real human customers! But it can help guide your questions and conversations.

3. Getting data and statistics for topics you need to research and explore

   1. I recently researched unemployment and layoff trends for 2025.

   2. Note: It helps that ChatGPT includes links to references so you can validate the data returned.

4. Researching the competitive landscape

   1. I tested this by asking who my top competitors are in the coaching space.

   2. I refined the prompt by asking more about positioning, marketing, and offers.

   3. Note: I received slightly different responses to the identical prompt text over two different sessions and very different answers across tools. So, capture the output and consolidate your own report, instead of trusting that the answer will remain stable when you return to the tool.

5. Coming up with marketing ideas

   1. I used a custom GPT for marketing to generate ideas for messaging and reaching my target audience online (e.g., social media posts).

   2. Jasper seems promising as a complete AI marketing solution, but they only offer a free 7-day trial.

6. Generating copy for advertising and social media

   1. I’ve used Copy.ai to brainstorm ideas for social media posts and ads.

   2. However, I’m not sure the results are better than what I can do with ChatGPT and Claude. Claude generated very detailed LinkedIn posts that I could tweak and tune.

   3. I’m intrigued by Lately.ai since it can generate dozens of social media posts from my content (e.g., my articles and podcast episodes) instead of pulling from a general database or the web. But the pricing is a bit steep for a solopreneur.

7. Transcribing speech to text from an audio file

   1. I use Substack’s AI transcription tool to generate transcripts for my podcast episodes pretty much every week.

   2. I’ve also used Descript to generate transcripts and edit audio simply by editing the text. It’s pretty cool!

8. Automated summaries of my Zoom meetings

   1. I use Zoom daily, so automated meeting summaries are helpful for me and my business.

   2. The “Catch me up” feature of the AI Companion is also quite useful if you’ve missed part of a meeting.

9. Leveraging AI assistance in your workspace and workflow

   1. Notion AI is hard to beat for this use case. It learns from your workspace and makes personalized recommendations (e.g., a reading list, analyzing and editing documents, creating draft templates).

   2. I also create illustrations and images for my businesses, so I tried using Canva AI to generate some visual assets (e.g., Instagram posts). But I wasn’t impressed. It mangled the text in the image pretty badly.

10. Grammar checking and writing analysis

    1. I do not use AI tools to write. I enjoy writing; the process helps me think, and working without AI first ensures the results sound like me. But I do use Grammarly and ProWritingAid to check my spelling and grammar. They often annoy me, and I frequently ignore their attempts to make my writing sound generic, but they do catch the clumsy mistakes I make.

    2. Writing analysis can help me tune my language, too (e.g., be more positive, use less business jargon).

    3. Note: Resist the urge to take all the recommendations from these tools. They remove much of my personality and voice, so I’m careful with the suggestions I accept.

Finally, I’m going to test creating my own custom GPT. Here’s an article about how and why you might want to do that. And here’s a help article about how to do that.

Hope this has been helpful! If you have other AI services and tools you recommend, please leave a comment and share them with us.

---

Larry Cornett is a Freedom Coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become invincible, and create new opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of what you love and less of what you hate! Check out his new Invincible Solopreneurs Daily Journal!

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash