Insights From Our Experts

ChatGPT is going to be a game changer for your business. Here are some examples. You’ll want to try it out yourself.

Through my decades as an entrepreneur and a technologist, I have seen firsthand the impact technology has made on business. ChatGPT represents one of those fundamental game changers, and I am encouraged by its potential to fundamentally change the way we work.

My branding agency began using ChatGPT just about a month ago, and already it has disrupted the way we work. Here are a few ways.

Researching a Topic Quickly

I am working with a new client that builds solutions for an enterprise resource planning system I haven’t worked with before. I asked ChatGPT to provide examples of companies that use this ERP system to run their business. It created a list of 10 well-known companies with information on how they use the platform.

This research would have taken my team six to eight hours to collect and put together. We run a strategy meeting almost every week, so we have saved 40 to 50 hours in work. This step is typically assigned to a staff researcher or provided by the client. I was able to skip it altogether and begin the next phase of the discovery work, shaving a week off the timeline and money spent on assigning a research resource, such as a contractor or other freelancer.

Similarly, ask ChatGPT to provide the top competitors to a company with their social media handles in a table. Moments later, you have everything you need to do a review–and you know which competitors to consider.

Removing the Mundane

One example of a very tedious task for my team is adding meta descriptions to the pages of the websites we manage. Metadata gives search engines context about what is on a page of a website. We recently launched a very large website with hundreds of pages for a client, and this functionality alone will save a significant number of hours for our writing team.

With ChatGPT, you never have to write another meta description manually again.

Simply ask ChatGPT to “create a meta description for [URL here]” or post the full text of the page into ChatGPT that includes “[this keyword] and a call to action,” and ChatGPT spits out a great meta description you can copy and paste into the backend of your site. This is typically outsourced, and since we launched several websites with a combined total of over 100 pages in the past few weeks, using Chat GPT adds those previously outsourced dollars to our company’s bottom line to the tune of about $7,500.

Google already rewrites up to 90 percent of meta descriptions before displaying them in search engine results, so there has always been debate about how much time to spend on trying to make them good. ChatGPT solves this debate. Don’t spend any time writing meta descriptions. Use ChatGPT instead.

An Objective Tool for Evaluation

In order to establish a strategy for our clients, I need to understand how the outside world views them.

One of the coolest uses of ChatGPT I have seen is simply asking what it thinks a company, product or service does–and then comparing the result to an evaluation of alternatives. If the description is off base, it points to a need to improve existing content and it is useful insight for creating an effective move-forward content approach to cover any gaps.

You can also look at other aspects of your business, such as the employee benefits you provide or the way you compensate your employees. I used it to evaluate a scaled compensation plan I am considering this year. ChatGPT provided a summary of considerations to inform this potential change, including many I hadn’t thought to include in my initial research.

ChatGPT and the Future of Search

Search engine optimization is a key offering in my company’s suite of services. The biggest potential long-term implication to SEO is: What will ChatGPT do to search as a whole?

If people can get information they’re looking for without looking through a bunch of search results and clicking through to an actual website, will they start to go to ChatGPT instead of their favorite search engine? What is the future of both organic and paid search as methods for driving traffic to websites?

These are questions my leadership team and I need to think through as we do our planning for the company. Is it appropriate to build a practice area around ChatGPT (like SEO feeds search) or is the technology the tip of the iceberg for a much larger disruption?

ChatGPT Will Replace Jobs, But Not Just Because It Exists

AT&T recently announced that 411 directory assistance and the ability to dial a telephone operator will be phased out in coming months. It wasn’t the Internet that led to the demise of these services, it was companies like Google that capitalized on the Internet that caused their obsolescence.

Similarly, ChatGPT can provide the basis for many prosaic tasks that are performed as jobs or parts of jobs today, but it won’t replace these jobs on its own. A savvy entrepreneur who figures out how to monetize the features of ChatGPT and puts that into the framework of a business will create the kind of disruption seen repeated throughout history.