Most small business owners have heard of ChatGPT but aren't sure how to actually use it. The headlines are full of hype about AI replacing jobs and transforming industries, but that doesn't help you get through your to-do list. Forget the big picture for now — here are five things you can do with it this week that will genuinely save you time. (I'm using ChatGPT as the example because it's the name most people know, but tools like Claude and Gemini work similarly — try a few and see which suits how you think.)
1. Draft customer emails
Responding to enquiries, following up on quotes, handling complaints — these eat up hours every week. Give ChatGPT some context about your business and the tone you want, and it'll give you a solid starting point you can edit. It won't capture your exact voice on the first try, but it's faster than staring at a blank screen. The trick is to refine your prompt: tell it who you are, who you're writing to, and what outcome you want.
2. Write social media posts
Tell it what you're promoting, who your audience is, and which platform you're posting to. LinkedIn needs a different tone than Instagram. It won't produce anything brilliant — you'll still need to add your personality and check it doesn't sound generic — but it gets you 80% of the way there. Useful when you need to post consistently but don't have time to craft everything from scratch.
3. Summarise long documents
Paste in a contract, supplier agreement, policy document, or industry article and ask for the key points. It's surprisingly good at pulling out what matters. Great for getting up to speed quickly without reading every word, or for deciding whether something is worth your full attention. Just don't rely on it for legal or financial decisions — use it to understand, then verify.
4. Create FAQ responses
Feed it the common questions you get from customers — the ones you answer over and over again. It'll draft responses you can refine and reuse on your website, in emails, or in your onboarding materials. This is also increasingly important for visibility: AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI overviews pull answers from well-structured FAQ content. This is sometimes called Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — making sure your content is the source AI tools cite when people ask questions in your space.
5. Brainstorm ideas
Stuck on a tagline, blog topic, product name, or marketing angle? Use it as a brainstorming partner. Ask for 10 options, then ask it to refine the best one, or combine elements from a few. Most suggestions won't be right, but that's not the point — it gets you unstuck and thinking in new directions. You can always throw out what doesn't work.
Get Started Today
None of this replaces thinking. But it does replace staring at a blank page. The key is to start small: pick one of these, try it today, and see if it saves you time. If it doesn't, you've lost 10 minutes. But if it does work, build from there and soon you might find yourself saving hours each week.
