A.I. is having a big effect on how small businesses work.

Work Smart Not Hard Tip No. 26 in a series written for Indie Cambs.

You’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard about how ChatGPT and other A.I. tools are impacting how every type of business works.

If you’re tempted to switch off because “you don’t do AI” I suggest you stick around because this is a game changer for every one of us.

(Caveat: All the usual cautions apply – don’t share sensitive or personal information, check the facts, etc., etc.)

First off the latest version ChatGPT-4o is totally free to everyone, not just paying customers. (The ‘o’ stands for OMNI = everywhere / everything) Go to https://chatgpt.com/ right now and you’ll be offered a range of things to try:

• Create a content calendar for a TikTok account
• Design a fun coding game
• Make me a personal webpage
• Draft an email for a bereaved employee
• Draft a contract for onboarding a new client
• Answer this customer complaint for me
• Write me a grant funding application

Play with some of these and then ask it do something you really want help with and it will do it in less time than it takes you to type the instruction.

When you get into a conversation it’s no longer like talking to a robot. It’s more nuanced, it’s more emotional, and it can engage in real-time voice conversations,  responding instantly and naturally compared  to previous models.

If you’re talking to someone who speaks a different language to you it will translate in real time with nuanced, human sounding speech. Maybe you could use it instead of subtitles on films?

Now you can have a desktop app of ChatGPT-4o and it will work alongside you on your laptop. You can talk to it as you’re working and it will act like a personal assistant.

Use Google view to take a photo, upload it, and say, “What  are you seeing?” But integrating real-time vision is incredible. It will show you round a city like a human guide, explain a painting in a gallery, tell you the ingredients on your plate, identify flowers, birds and more.  Be My Eyes (https://www.bemyeyes.com/ is using it as a service for blind and visually impaired people).

Google Gemini and Google Search have had major updates that provide quick summaries  and additional relevant information when you’re  doing complex search queries. There’s also video search,  which is similar to how Google Lens works but with videos. You can say, “Watch this  YouTube video and now quiz me on it.” (Mastermind training anyone?)

Next is Google Workspace: Gmail, Docs, Sheets,  Meet, etc., are all getting a range of  new features, all powered by Gemini. It will summarize conversations, provide  meeting highlights, process data, etc.

VEO is their  new video tool, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E.

This is the ecosystem we are  going to live in. When it’s integrated we’ll be writing an email or a paper or an article like this with “somebody” alongside us helping, and actually sounding like a human.

Working smart will get easier than ever!