How I use AI in my little business
How I ended up using it
I've always been quite open about my feelings around AI. I understand why people are wary of it, and I was pretty tentative about using it myself to begin with. I originally started using ChatGPT for things I found difficult, like complex spreadsheets and maths.
Over time, though, I've found it surprisingly useful for a tiny business like mine. And Jo Thornton really is tiny – it is me! I choose and develop the products, answer the emails, manage the website, do the accounts and stock planning, pack and dispatch the orders and everything else in between. I also live with lupus, so there are inevitably times when both my time and energy are rather stretched.
As I've used ChatGPT more, it has gradually built up a very good understanding of my products, how I work, my approach to customer service and, importantly, the way I communicate. I've been quite surprised by how useful it can be as a second pair of eyes – particularly for helping me spot things I've missed, organise information and make sense of the bits of running a business that I find more difficult.
I've now started using some of that knowledge to help me with certain customer emails too.
What I mean when I say it helps with emails
I want to be really clear about this, because most of us have encountered an AI customer-service chatbot by now, and I know that experience can feel very different from dealing with an actual person.
That isn't what I'm doing.
I'm not handing you over to a chatbot to answer your questions, and I'm not asking AI to read an email, decide what you need and independently write my customer service for me.
The first person to read your email is me.
ChatGPT does not automatically read through my inbox or all my customer emails. I read them myself and decide whether I want to use it to help with a particular reply at all. I decide what I think, what advice I want to give and what I want the answer to say.
If I do use ChatGPT, I tell it what I want included, correct it if it gets something wrong and use it to help me turn everything I want to say into a clear reply. It is also rather useful for stopping me waffling, wandering off on a tangent or writing something that makes perfect sense in my head but perhaps slightly less sense to everybody else!
So although it can help me with the actual writing, it isn't making the decisions or deciding what advice to give you. The knowledge, judgement and final responsibility are still mine. Nothing is automatically answered and nothing is automatically sent.
Some emails will never involve AI
Some of the emails I receive are incredibly personal. Customers sometimes tell me very private things or simply pour their hearts out to me, and I can usually see straight away when AI has no place in that conversation.
That judgement happens before I decide whether ChatGPT has any place in helping me. I read the email first and make that decision myself. If something feels too personal or sensitive, I simply don't use AI for that conversation.
And if you would prefer me not to use AI assistance with your emails at all, that's absolutely fine too. Just tell me. I would much rather you felt comfortable contacting me.
Why use it at all?
A detailed customer email can quite easily take me 15 or 20 minutes to write. Multiply that by quite a few emails in one day, while I'm also trying to pack and dispatch everybody's orders and run the rest of the business, and it becomes a surprisingly large part of my working day.
The one thing I really don't want to do is solve that problem by making my emails shorter and less helpful. Personal advice is an important part of what I do, especially when people are buying something they may already feel nervous or unsure about. I also want to keep my prices as affordable as I reasonably can rather than continually putting them up simply to cover more of my time.
For me, using AI in this way feels like a good compromise. It helps with the time-consuming job of turning everything I want to say into a clear email, while still allowing me to give customers the detailed, personal help that matters to me.
That's really where I think AI can be useful for someone like me: not replacing a tiny business owner, not replacing my judgement and certainly not replacing the relationship I have with my customers, but helping one person do a little more without losing the personal bit in the process.