AI within Your Business

[Amiaf]

Striven Community, we want to hear from you!

Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming an advantageous tool for businesses, with uses from generating responses to customer communications, to enhancing financial forecasts for more in-depth analysis.
We recently discussed some of the boundless possibilities AI can bring to your business on the Striven Blog, which you can read here. As ever increasing numbers of companies incorporate AI into their operations, creative ERP solutions are constantly being discovered.

We would love to know how your company is incorporating AI into your daily operations. Share your experience with AI solutions by replying to this post!

[DBricker]

We are just dipping our toes in the AI waters, but here are some of the tools I’m using currently.

ChatGPT - The original is still the best value for getting started in AI. You can play for free, but for $20/mo you can do a lot more. I’ll just give you 2 examples of how the free version can help you on a daily basis.

• Use it with Excel and Google Sheets. You don’t need to be a spreadsheet master to create powerful and functional spreadsheets. You can tell ChatGPT to act as an Excel expert and provide you with the formulas to complete tasks. Remembering the formula to compare two lists of data and return only the unique rows on a separate sheet with only the columns you want is hard. ChatGPT will tell you. With the pad version, you can upload an Excel file and tell ChatGPT what to do with it, then download the completed work. The trick is to be precise. If your column is labeled “Price” don’t try to ask ChatGPT to modify the “MSRP” column.
• It will write text for you, often faster and more on-task than you could have. The trick is in the command prompt. There is now a pretty standard formula to writing a command prompt for ChatGPT: “Role + Specific Information + Intent + Response Format”. This the formula and it’s a great place to start, but you can get ChatGPT to make it better by asking, “You are a ChatGPT expert. I need to create a marketing plan for a new product from Acme Corp from you. The ChatGPT prompt I’m planning on using is “You are a professional marketing consultant. I need a product rollout plan for a new widget called “Super Widget 2000” from Widget All Stars. The main features are [features] and the benefits are [benefits]. I am targeting women from 25-50 in Pittsburg that have a household income from $80,000 and up. Your response should include instructions and ad copy for print, radio, Facebook, Instagram and an idea for a video we can use on TikTok.” I need you to ask me any questions you need to provide me with the best possible prompt to get the most successful result.”

UseMotion - Pre-Striven, all of my tasks were just a to-do list of work and personal items that needed a duration in minutes or hours, had a due date, a description, and not much more. Tending to overfill my plate, there were a lot of tasks that got missed, or ‘fun’ tasks preempted tedious tasks because I was making the decisions. I took the decisions of when the tasks took place out of my hands by implementing UseMotion. It’s an AI calendar scheduler that works with Google, Apple, and MS, and it places the tasks in the open spaces of my workday in the order they need to be completed, the order of importance, and the time slots available. I even set up an IFTTT script so I could use voice prompts to my Android phone to create tasks automatically. “Hey Google. Create a task that will take 15 minutes to get the framing specs for the AX42 over to Steve for the 3rd time this week. It needs to be done today.” Like magic, the task is created and scheduled for a 15 minute block on today’s schedule, possibly bumping something that didn’t need to be done as urgently.

Eleven Labs - This is the easiest tool for professional and lifelike voice cloning. Like most people, I hate hearing my voice. It has always bothered me to listen to my voice on our voicemail greetings and clips for our phone system. I recently created professional (and AI-enhanced) greetings, prompts, and on-hold messages for the system. As an added benefit, the AI voice never gets interrupted, has a dog barking in the background, or stumbles over alliteration. You may need to play with your text to provide the appropriate phonetic instruction to the AI, but ChatGPT will help you write the script if you ask.
I’m now working on providing numbers my field techs can use as their “cell phone number” for clients through our VOIP provider. It will allow them to text and call clients when they are on the way or to answer questions without giving away their personal cell numbers. I don’t want to leave a voicemail greeting for these lines to my techs. Imagine, “Hey. grunt, cough This is Steve. Leave a message.”
Instead, a pleasant young woman will say, “Thank you for calling Steve, a service tech for Picks Gallery. It’s after business hours right now, so Steve isn’t available. If you press 1, I can answer several questions about products and order status. Or, you can press 2 to leave a message that Steve will receive at the beginning of the next business day.”

FakeYou - A slightly more nefarious version of Eleven Labs, and a little trickier to use. I’m not sure it’s commercially viable, but it was fun having Morgan Freeman, Peter Griffin, and Billy Mays create messages for the company. I started working on a Samuel L Jackson one, but bleeping out all the ‘mutha%$@#as’ took too much time. “Those guys at Picks put fireplaces on the mutha%$#@in’ porch!” This is followed by, “The path of the remodeling man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the poor installation techniques of many men. Blessed is he who, in the name of quality and good judgment, calls Picks Gallery for his shower door and fireplace needs, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the builder of fine homes.”

Tango - If it happens on a computer or phone and you need to show more than one person how to do it, or show one person multiple times, use Tango. It’s so much more than a screenshot generator. It’s a process generator. Need to show someone how you want staff to create a new Opportunity? Tango. How do I perform all of the steps needed to handle a bounced check in Striven? Tango. Want an easy walkthrough for customers to show them how to use your payment page? Tango.

VentureKit - Its claim to fame is that it can write a compelling business plan for startups, but that’s not its best trick. Business owners have a hard time looking at their business as anything but the best thing since sliced bread. VentureKit can be your 3rd party consultant that brutishly looks at only your numbers and past performance to provide metrics that show you the reality of your situation. It can make clear the changes that need to be made today, tomorrow, or in 3-5 years. It can evaluate the idea of bringing on a new line of products or services and what it will take to be successful. It takes all of the emotion out of the equation and looks at the idea the same way a heartless banker would, which is exactly what you need.

HeyGen - Making, sharing and embedding videos has never really been easier. Make an avatar of anyone on your team, or use one of the many they have and create a custom video for internal onboarding, your website or social media. Here’s one I threw together in about 10 minutes.

Reddit is a great place to go screaming down the AI rabbit hole. Just set a timer so you can get back to work before too long.

[Amiaf]

Hello, Darin (@DBricker)!

Thank you so much for your contribution! This information is incredibly valuable to us! If you ever have more to add on the topic of AI within Your Business, or if you have any questions for our team, feel free to reach out.

-Amia

[DBricker]

I’ve been playing with a brand new system from Flex Technologies called RUBI-AI that is incorporating ALL of the major AI models into one localized service. In addition, it automatically chooses the best possible model when you use it for content creation or chat. For the marketing side of your business, this tool is a game changer but for those of you paying $20/mo for just Chat GPT, for $25/month you can have all models and modules and share them with 2 others in your business.

• Personalized ‘Persona’ creation so you capture the exact tone you want for your audience
• Create different personas for varied subsets of your audience
• Voice overs, Avatars, Custom music
• Original photo quality images
• Social Media and Blog content creation
• Website and PDF crawling for training and data for new content
• Business plans, statistic analysis, business proposals
• Personal trainer, health and wellness, time management
• More coming every day, as this is brand new

There are already over 100 modules, that replace almost everything I suggested originally. It’s perfect for someone doesn’t know much about computers, AI, or technology in general. Anyone that uses Google to find an answer for how to do something, will find this far more helpful.

For example, here is a first attempt at creating “Peter” a friendly personified flame to be the mascot for Picks Gallery that we will use to create videos on our website and in social media.

All creations can be used anywhere with no license and can be optimized to keep Google from thinking your site is an AI driven ad bomb so you don’t hurt your rankings.

8 Minute Presentation and Demo

Here’s a link to get started. You can choose from “Retail” or “Distributor”. If you sign up as a distributor, you get a bit of a discount and can get credits for spreading the word, like this. If you use my link, I’ll get credit, which is cool, but I wouldn’t share it if it wasn’t awesome and saves money and time from the moment you sign up.