SMALL and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are being encouraged to harness the power of AI, specifically ChatGPT, for data analytics and business improvement.

Larren Peart, the CEO of Bluedot, unveiled strategies at the Young Entrepreneur Association (YEA) Summit during Global Entrepreneurship Week, revealing how SMEs can “dominate with data”, eliminating the need for costly researchers like Bluedot and revolutionising the way businesses operate.

“I use AI more than Google now – I don’t use Google anymore; I put it in ChatGPT because I know I’m going to get the actual results that I want. I don’t have to click on 10 links to find it; that’s the beauty of ChatGPT,” expressed Peart in his presentation.

He urged SMEs to embrace technology along with the era of data-driven decision-making.

“In 2023 and beyond, if you are not making decisions with data, you are in a sad state,” warned Peart, underscoring the critical role of data in decision-making.

The CEO highlighted McKinsey’s research, indicating that AI could potentially increase global corporate profits by $4.4 trillion and reduce customer service costs by 30 per cent through AI chat bots. Bluedot, known for its focus on data collection, recognises the imminent challenge AI poses to traditional job roles and the disruption its own businesses face by AI but sees abundant opportunities for SMEs in terms of innovation and growth.

Peart emphasised the importance of “prompt engineering”, stressing that the effectiveness of AI analysis lies in the specificity of prompts. He encouraged SMEs to use ChatGPT for competitive analysis, providing prompts to copy for ease of use.

“You need to understand what your competitors are doing and the services they offer. The more information you give at the prompt, the better the results,” explained Peart. He demonstrated using a competitor’s website as a prompt for a competitive analysis.

Peart shed light on how AI, including ChatGPT, can revolutionise the research space by generating questionnaires.

“You can use ChatGPT or other AI tools to generate questionnaires. By explaining who you are and what your business consists of, you construct your prompts to tell the AI to assume the role, and it will adopt the persona and reply and respond,” he elucidated.

The CEO demonstrated how AI can streamline various processes, including facilitating customer satisfaction surveys, conducting market research, analysing website traffic, and extracting insights from both social media and e-mail marketing analytics. Previously, Bluedot’s data analysis and report writing process took a considerable two weeks, involving a team of costly experts. Despite advancements, Peart admitted it still consumes a fortnight.

“We’re in the process of developing a tool, leveraging ChatGPT, that will enable us to accomplish the same tasks in just two days,” he revealed.

Peart highlighted that businesses can achieve similar results by opting for ChatGPT Plus, which will allow users to upload data collected from social media or e-mail marketing and instruct the AI to analyse, generating charts and sophisticated analyses, including cross tabulations and regression analyses.

He also recommended employing AI for financial forecasting and budgeting, prompting the system to evaluate business positioning, interpret balance sheets, and assess profit and loss (P&L) statements.

“All of this critical data demands constant monitoring, and AI can be a valuable tool in aiding your oversight,” Peart emphasised.

He cautioned, however, that ChatGPT has the potential for AI “hallucination” and emphasised the importance of constructing precise prompts and personas. But once that is set, he says AI can assist greatly in data analytics.

“You should constantly be using the data to optimise your workforce. So the data that you get from everything else that I just spoke about, use it to train your staff to develop the manual,” Peart asserted.