How to use ChatGPT for business?

ChatGPT can be useful for far more in business than writing a few social media posts or making an email sound more professional.

After looking through hundreds of Reddit comments from people using ChatGPT at work and in their own businesses, the most interesting examples were often about saving time, improving decisions and removing repetitive work.

People are using it for marketing, competitor research, sales preparation, customer support, project planning, spreadsheets, automation, coding, proposals, pricing, recruitment and business strategy.

One startup founder described using AI across almost every non-development part of the business: strategy, marketing, sales, customer success and product development. 

The biggest opportunity is not necessarily getting ChatGPT to do your job for you. It is finding all the small tasks that take 10, 20 or 30 minutes and asking if ChatGPT could make each of them faster.

Use ChatGPT as a business thought partner

One of the most useful shifts is to stop treating ChatGPT purely as something that produces content.

Use it to think with you.

You can give it an idea, problem or half-formed plan and ask it to question your assumptions.

I am going to explain a business idea to you. Don't immediately tell me it is a good idea. Ask me questions, identify weaknesses, challenge my assumptions and tell me what I may have overlooked.

You could also ask:

What are the strongest arguments against this idea?

If this business failed in 12 months, what are the five most likely reasons?

What questions should I be asking before I spend money on this?

One Reddit user described ChatGPT as more useful as a thought partner than a content generator: something to work through ideas with rather than simply copying its output. 

Research your competitors

Competitor research is another obvious business use, but you can go much further than asking ChatGPT to list your competitors.

You could give it your website and several competitor websites and ask it to compare:

• services
• positioning
• pricing
• target customers
• messaging
• content
• reviews
• strengths and weaknesses

Research my five main competitors. Compare their services, positioning, target market, pricing where available, strengths, weaknesses and the main promises they make to customers. Then identify gaps or opportunities that my business could explore.

A startup founder in the Reddit discussions described using AI to analyse competitors, identify gaps in the market and refine their ideal customer profile. 

For current competitor information, make sure ChatGPT searches the web rather than relying solely on information it already knows.

Work out who your ideal customer actually is

You can also use ChatGPT to help refine your ideal customer rather than inventing a generic marketing persona called Sarah who likes yoga and drinks coffee.

Give it information you genuinely have:

• customer enquiries
• reviews
• sales conversations
• frequently asked questions
• customer feedback
• common objections
• your most profitable jobs or customers

Then ask it to find patterns.

Based on this customer information, identify the types of people who appear to be the best fit for my business. Look for repeated problems, priorities, objections, buying triggers and reasons they choose us.

You can then use those findings to improve your website, marketing and sales messages.

Brainstorm marketing ideas without starting from a blank page

ChatGPT is particularly useful when you know your business but have run out of ideas for talking about it.

Instead of asking:

Give me 30 social media ideas.

give it something substantial to work from:

These are the services I offer, the questions customers regularly ask and the problems they have before contacting me. Give me 30 useful content ideas based on those actual customer problems. Avoid generic promotional posts.

You can use it to generate ideas for:

• blog posts
• social media
• email newsletters
• videos
• FAQs
• lead magnets
• case studies
• sales pages

You can use ChatGPT for content briefs, outlines and brainstorming different marketing angles rather than simply asking it to produce finished content. 

Improve content you have already written

ChatGPT can be particularly useful as an editor.

Instead of asking it to write an article from scratch, write your rough version first and ask ChatGPT to improve it.

Review this draft for clarity, structure and readability. Keep my meaning and tone. Point out repetition, vague wording and sections that need more explanation. Do not completely rewrite it.

You could also ask:

Which parts of this page sound generic?

Where am I talking too much about my business instead of the customer?

What questions would a potential customer still have after reading this?

Keep writing your own content while using AI for editing, clarity, tone and SEO optimisation.

Use ChatGPT for SEO

ChatGPT can help with many parts of SEO, particularly the thinking and organisation around it.

You can use it to:

• generate keyword ideas
• group related keywords
• analyse search intent
• create content outlines
• improve title tags and meta descriptions
• find internal linking opportunities
• generate FAQs
• compare competitor content
• identify missing topics
• review existing pages

Here is the content from my service page and the pages currently ranking for my target search. Compare them and identify important topics, questions or information competitors cover that my page does not.

ChatGPT can help build and/or enhance your website and improve its SEO despite having little technical experience.

Do not assume keyword volumes, rankings or current Google results are correct unless ChatGPT has actually checked a current data source.

Write better emails faster

Email is one of the simplest business uses of ChatGPT because it removes the time spent staring at a half-written message wondering how to word it.

You can paste in your rough version:

This is what I need to say. Rewrite it as a concise, friendly professional email. Do not make it overly formal or add unnecessary pleasantries.

Or ask it to change the tone:

Make this email firmer without sounding aggressive.

Remove the frustration from this message but keep the point clear.

Shorten this to no more than three paragraphs.

Many business owners use ChatGPT for client emails and correspondence as part of their normal workflow.

Prepare for sales calls

Before speaking to a prospect, ChatGPT can help you understand the business you are approaching.

I have a sales meeting with this company. Research what they do, who their customers are, recent developments, likely challenges and anything relevant to the service I sell. Give me ten intelligent questions I could ask during the meeting.

You could also give ChatGPT the enquiry or previous correspondence and ask:

Based on this enquiry, what do you think matters most to this prospect? What questions should I ask before recommending anything?

You can use ChatGPT every day for account research, meeting preparation, cold outreach and managing information from sales conversations.

Personalise sales emails

Generic cold outreach is easy to ignore.

If you have genuine information about the company you are contacting, ChatGPT can help turn it into a more relevant message.

Research this company and identify three genuine reasons why my service could be relevant to them. Then draft a short outreach email based on the strongest reason. Do not use fake compliments or pretend I know things that cannot be verified.

You can also create different value propositions for different types of customers.

Use AI for personalised outbound emails, sales-call summaries, demo scripts and different value propositions for customer segments. 

Summarise sales calls and identify next steps

Once you have a call transcript or meeting notes, ChatGPT can turn them into something more useful.

Summarise this sales call. Give me the customer's goals, problems, objections, questions, buying signals, decisions made and the next actions for both sides.

You can also ask:

What did I fail to ask?

What objections are still unresolved?

What should my follow-up email focus on?

This is where ChatGPT becomes less about generating text and more about extracting useful information from information you already have.

Turn meeting notes into actions

A page of meeting notes is not particularly useful if nobody knows what happens next.

Paste the notes or transcript into ChatGPT and ask:

Turn these meeting notes into a concise summary. Separate decisions, outstanding questions and actions. For every action, identify the owner and deadline if one was mentioned.

You can also ask it to prepare an agenda for the next meeting based on unresolved items.

Turning meeting notes into action items is now a routine productivity habit that we use almost daily. 

Plan projects and break large jobs into manageable tasks

ChatGPT can be useful when you know the goal but aren’t sure how to organise the work.

I need to launch a new website in eight weeks. Break the project into stages, tasks and dependencies. Identify what needs to happen first and what can happen simultaneously.

Then go deeper:

Turn this into a weekly project plan.

What have I probably forgotten?

Which tasks are most likely to delay the project?

Use ChatGPT to organise messy thoughts, rough plans and projects into something easier to act on.

Create standard operating procedures

If you repeatedly perform the same task, ChatGPT can help you turn the process into an SOP.

You can simply explain how you currently do it:

I'm going to describe how I process a new client enquiry. Turn what I tell you into a clear standard operating procedure that another member of staff could follow.

Then ask:

Where are the gaps or ambiguous steps in this process?

Which parts could potentially be automated?

This is particularly useful for small businesses where a lot of knowledge still lives in the owner’s head.

Create training materials

Once you have your procedures documented, ChatGPT can turn them into training material.

You could ask it to create:

• training guides
• checklists
• quizzes
• FAQs
• role-play scenarios
• examples of good and poor practice

Turn this procedure into a training guide for a new member of staff. Include examples, common mistakes and a ten-question quiz at the end.

You can use ChatGPT for lesson plans and said it also produced better quiz questions than they normally created. 

Create onboarding information for customers

You can apply exactly the same principle to customer onboarding.

Give ChatGPT the questions new customers ask and the information you normally provide.

Create a simple onboarding guide for a new customer. Explain what happens after they sign, what we need from them, what they can expect from us and the most common questions they are likely to have.

You could turn the result into:

• welcome emails
• client guides
• FAQs
• checklists
• support documentation

Customer onboarding, support documentation and analysing customer feedback – these are all tasks ChatGPT can help you with.

Analyse customer feedback

If you have dozens or hundreds of reviews, survey responses, support messages or interview notes, reading them individually can make patterns hard to see.

ChatGPT can help group recurring themes.

Analyse this customer feedback. Group similar comments together and identify the most common complaints, requests, positive themes and repeated language customers use.

You could then ask:

Which problems appear most urgent?

Which issues could be solved through better communication rather than changing the product?

Which phrases customers use would be useful to reflect in our marketing?

Write and improve proposals

Proposals are another area where ChatGPT can save a lot of time without needing to write the entire thing for you.

You can provide:

• the brief
• your notes
• the client’s requirements
• your proposed approach
• examples of previous proposals

Then ask:

Review this proposal against the client's requirements. Identify anything they asked for that I have not addressed clearly.

Or:

Turn these rough notes into a logical proposal structure. Do not invent services, claims, prices or evidence.

You can ask ChatGPT to remind you of a particular proposal-review process that you want to use for your business.

Respond to tenders and RFPs

If you respond to tenders or requests for proposals, ChatGPT can help compare the requirements against your response.

Read this RFP and create a checklist of every mandatory requirement, document, deadline, scoring criterion and question we need to answer.

Then:

Compare our draft response against the checklist and show me anything missing or weak.

This is a much safer and more useful approach than simply saying:

Write this tender response for me.

Apply for grants

Grant applications are another good example because the first job is usually understanding exactly what the funder wants.

You can give ChatGPT the grant conditions, asking it to summarise and rank the most important requirements, and then using those alongside their programme information to prepare the proposal. 

You could use:

Read these grant criteria. Create a checklist of every eligibility condition and scoring criterion. Rank the five areas that appear most important.

Then:

Compare my project description against these criteria. Tell me where the evidence is strong, weak or missing.

Do not allow ChatGPT to invent evidence or claims simply to make the application sound stronger.

Get a second opinion on your pricing

Pricing is difficult because business owners often start with what feels reasonable rather than what the work is actually worth.

You could ask:

Here is the detailed scope of this project. Help me identify everything that should be included when calculating the price, including time, risk, revisions, project management and potential hidden work.

You could also ask it to compare several pricing structures:

Show me the advantages and disadvantages of charging £2,500 fixed price versus £750 per month for four months.

Do not rely on ChatGPT to magically know the correct price, but it can help expose things you forgot to include.

Prepare for negotiations

ChatGPT can help you think through a negotiation before you are sitting opposite the other person.

I need to negotiate this contract. Act as the other party. What objections are they likely to make, where do they have leverage and where do I have leverage?

You could then role-play the conversation:

Play the client. Push back on my price and make me defend it. After each response, tell me what I could have handled better.

ChatGPT can help you with commercial lease negotiations, counteroffers and salary negotiations.

Draft difficult complaint letters and responses

This is another surprisingly common use.

If a supplier, insurer, landlord, bank or another organisation has caused a problem, ChatGPT can help you organise the timeline and write a clear response.

Here is the timeline, the contract and the emails between us. Summarise what happened in chronological order and identify the points I should address in a formal complaint.

Then:

Draft a firm but professional complaint using only the facts and evidence I have provided. Do not invent legal rights or regulations.

Many have used ChatGPT for insurance disputes, lease issues, refunds and formal complaints. Those are user-reported outcomes rather than proof that ChatGPT’s legal interpretation was correct, so any important legal point should be independently checked.

Use ChatGPT with spreadsheets

You do not have to be good at Excel to get useful help from ChatGPT.

You can explain what you want in normal language:

I have dates in column A, customer names in column B and sales values in column C. I want a formula that shows total sales for each customer during the current month. Explain the formula as well as giving it to me.

ChatGPT can help with:

• Excel formulas
• Google Sheets formulas
• data cleaning
• conditional formatting logic
• pivot table planning
• VBA macros
• data transformations
• CSV files

Clean and organise messy data

Businesses accumulate terrible spreadsheets.

ChatGPT can help you work out how to turn them into something usable.

This spreadsheet contains inconsistent customer names, dates in several formats and duplicate records. Explain how you would clean the data before analysing it.

You can also give it examples and ask for formulas or scripts that automate the cleaning.

Data cleaning and reformatting are now among the regular work tasks described by many users.

Automate repetitive admin

This is probably one of the biggest opportunities for many businesses.

Think about the jobs you repeatedly do that involve:

• copying information
• renaming files
• moving files
• formatting spreadsheets
• processing PDFs
• creating reports
• updating databases
• transferring data between systems

Then ask ChatGPT:

I perform this task every Monday. These are the exact steps. Which parts could be automated, and what would be the simplest way to automate them?

This can save you hours doing tedious tasks every week. 

Write small scripts even if you are not a programmer

You do not necessarily need to become a developer to benefit from code.

If you repeatedly perform something on a computer, explain the problem:

Every week I download five CSV files, remove the same columns, filter the data and paste the results into another spreadsheet. Can this be automated? Explain the simplest options for somebody who does not normally code.

Then ask ChatGPT to walk you through it rather than blindly running code you do not understand.

Build simple internal tools

Sometimes your business needs a tiny piece of software that nobody sells because the problem is too specific.

Examples might include:

• a quote calculator
• a job profitability calculator
• a data converter
• a reporting dashboard
• a form
• a small customer database
• a tool that reformats information

I currently calculate this manually in a spreadsheet. Could we turn the process into a simple web-based calculator? Ask me what inputs, formulas and outputs are required before suggesting how to build it.

You could create a niche app, internal tools and bespoke software with ChatGPT’s help. You can even create mobile phone apps that can result in monthly subscriptions.

Build and troubleshoot your website

ChatGPT can also help with the technical side of websites.

You could paste in code and ask:

This section of my website isn't displaying correctly on mobile. Here is the HTML and CSS. Explain what is causing the problem before suggesting a fix.

Or:

I want to add this feature to my website. Explain the different ways I could do it and which is least likely to cause maintenance problems.

You can use AI to manage parts of HubSpot, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and to write or debug HTML, CSS and JavaScript despite not being a coder.

Help with Google Tag Manager and analytics

Analytics tools can be intimidating if you don’t use them every day.

You can ask ChatGPT to explain what you need in plain English.

I want to track successful contact form submissions in Google Tag Manager and GA4. Explain what needs to happen step by step, including how I can test that it is working.

You can ask ChatGPT to help set up Google Tag Manager and its triggers.

You still need to test everything. Analytics mistakes can quietly produce bad data for months.

Research unfamiliar business topics quickly

One of ChatGPT’s strongest business uses is helping you get up to speed on a subject you know little about.

Instead of searching ten different articles, start with:

I need to understand this topic well enough to discuss it with a client tomorrow. Give me a beginner's explanation first, then the important terminology, common mistakes and ten questions I should be able to answer.

You can then keep asking questions until the subject makes sense.

This is particularly valuable when working in an area adjacent to their own expertise, where even knowing the right terminology to search for can take time. 

Use Deep Research for bigger business questions

Some questions require more than a normal web search.

For example:

Research the UK market for this service. Identify major competitors, typical customers, market trends, common pricing models, barriers to entry and potential opportunities. Cite the sources you use and separate facts from your conclusions.

Or:

Compare these five software platforms against our requirements. Use current product documentation and pricing. Create a table showing where each one meets or fails each requirement.

You can use deeper research for multi-step questions that would otherwise require hours of searching and cross-referencing. 

Compare suppliers, software and products

This can be particularly valuable when you have lots of technical information to compare.

Give ChatGPT the actual product information rather than asking it to rely on memory.

These are the specifications and prices from four suppliers. Create a comparison table based only on the information I have supplied. Highlight any information that is missing rather than guessing.

You can use AI to compare technical product data from several manufacturers for a construction project and calculate the required material thickness.

Improve your hiring process

ChatGPT can help before, during and after recruitment.

You could use it to:

• improve job descriptions
• create interview questions
• develop scorecards
• compare candidates against defined criteria
• create interview exercises
• write onboarding plans

Here is the job description. Create ten interview questions that test the actual skills required rather than inviting rehearsed answers. Explain what a strong answer should demonstrate.

Be careful about putting sensitive candidate information into AI tools and never let ChatGPT make employment decisions for you.

Prepare for your own job interview or promotion

Business use is not limited to business owners.

You can give ChatGPT your CV and the vacancy:

Here is my CV and the job description. Interview me one question at a time. Make the interview challenging. After every answer, tell me what was strong, what was weak and what I failed to demonstrate.

You can also use it to prepare evidence for promotions and performance reviews.

Create products and new revenue streams

Some people are using ChatGPT not simply to save time but to help create things they sell.

Examples in the Reddit discussions included:

• online courses
• apps
• websites
• software
• digital products
• new business services

That does not mean typing:

Give me a business that makes £10,000 per month.

will magically produce one.

A more useful approach is:

These are the skills, knowledge, customers and resources I already have. Identify problems I might be able to solve that could become an additional product or service.

Look for services you could add to your existing business

Before starting something completely new, ask if there are things your current customers already need.

These are the services we currently offer and these are the types of customers we work with. What related problems are those customers likely to have before, during or after buying from us? Which of those problems could logically become an additional service?

Ask ChatGPT to identify additional services you could offer existing clients that can lead to opportunities which could create substantial additional revenue.

Use ChatGPT to save money as well as make money

The value of ChatGPT does not always come from generating more sales.

It may come from:

• reducing repetitive admin
• avoiding unnecessary software
• automating manual processes
• learning skills instead of buying another course
• finding errors
• improving purchasing decisions

Look for the 15-minute jobs, not just the huge AI transformation

This may be one of the most important business lessons from all of the Reddit discussions.

It is easy to think:

“How can AI completely transform my company?”

A more useful question might be:

What tasks do I repeatedly spend 10 to 30 minutes on that ChatGPT could help me complete faster?

Use AI for a collection of small improvements rather than one enormous transformation. Individual workflows saved 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there, but together they easily add up to several hours per week.

That is where productivity improvements start to compound.

Some surprisingly profitable things people say they have used ChatGPT for

The Reddit discussions contained plenty of more unusual examples.

People reported using ChatGPT to:

• win or improve business proposals
• prepare grant applications
• negotiate commercial leases
• create online courses
• build subscription apps
• automate accounting tasks
• build websites without previous coding experience
• create internal business software
• prepare for salary negotiations
• identify additional services to sell existing clients
• reduce software and contractor costs
• create technical solutions that previously required outside suppliers

The business value of ChatGPT is often much broader than “write some marketing copy.

The best business prompt might simply be: What could I automate?

Take a normal working week and write down everything you repeatedly do.

Then ask:

These are the tasks I perform every week. Analyse them and put them into four groups: tasks ChatGPT could help with now, tasks that could potentially be automated, tasks where AI could assist but still need human judgement, and tasks that should remain entirely human.

You might discover that the biggest savings are in tasks you barely notice because you have been doing them manually for years.

What shouldn’t you blindly trust ChatGPT with in your business?

ChatGPT can make mistakes, invent information and sound extremely confident while doing it.

Be particularly careful with:

• legal advice
• tax advice
• financial decisions
• employment decisions
• technical work that could create safety or security risks
• confidential customer information
• commercially sensitive business data
• statistics and research that have not been verified
• current pricing and product information
• claims you intend to publish publicly

Think carefully before uploading client records, employee information, contracts, confidential financial information or commercially sensitive documents.

When accuracy matters, ask for sources and check them.

When the consequences of getting something wrong are significant, use the appropriate qualified professional.

ChatGPT is most useful when it works with you, not instead of you

The recurring theme in the Reddit discussions was not that ChatGPT suddenly runs the whole business.

It was that people found dozens of places where it could make something easier, faster or clearer.

• Give it the messy spreadsheet.
• Give it the meeting transcript.
• Give it the proposal requirements.
• Show it your current process.
• Explain the customer problem.
• Tell it where you keep losing time.

Then ask:

How could you help me do this better or faster?

That question is likely to uncover far more useful business applications than simply asking ChatGPT to write another social media post.