Small Business Big World
New episodes every Tuesday discussing the challenges, adventures and fun of being a small business owner. Each week we'll delve into various small business topics, from real-world DEI considerations to selling your business, using video to market your business, unique benefit offerings for your employees and so much more. Curated by the crew at Paper Trails.
Small Business Big World
A Beginner's Guide to AI for Small Business
Can AI tools really transform your small business into a powerhouse of efficiency and innovation? Join us as we talk with our Marketing Director, Jon Portanova, and learn how AI is not just a tech buzzword but a valuable ally for your small business. From video editing to social media strategies, we’ll share real-world examples of how these advanced tools can optimize operations and support your growth journey.
This is Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast prepared by the team at Paper Trails. Owning and running a small business is hard. Each week, we'll dive into the challenges, headaches, trends, fun and excitement of running a small business. After all, small businesses are the heartbeat of America and our team is here to keep them beating. Welcome to Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast talking about all of the misery of running a small business.
Speaker 2:It's not so bad.
Speaker 1:It's not so bad. Most days it's great. Actually, you know what? I went home Monday and I said today was a good day. We had a lot of wins. We had a new employee start, worked out great, closed a big deal. Everyone was firing on all cylinders. I didn't have any grumpy employees. I didn't have grumpy clients.
Speaker 2:Monday was a good day calendars. I didn't have any grumpy employees. I didn't have grumpy clients. Monday was a good day. And then you got that 9 pm phone call from a client. No, no, not even, not even. It was great.
Speaker 1:Good it was great See, so it's not always misery. Sometimes there's some good stuff with running a small business, and that's what we're here to talk about today is how to make your life a little easier in small business by using AI artificial intelligence. Right, that's today's John Portanova happy to be back marketing director here.
Speaker 1:He's coming back for the third time, I think, here with us. Welcome back. You know we have we've been employing some AI tools here at Paper Trails. We figured we'd share those with you just to give you an idea of how small businesses can use it right and go from there. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, I have to do my duty as host. John will yell at me if I don't. First, I want to thank everyone for listening and remember please like, share, rate, review, follow, subscribe all of those fun things. Please help us rank a little better. Please help us grow the podcast for more listeners like you who are enjoying this. We are everywhere on social media that you would probably think about finding someone like us, right? We're on all the social platforms. We are on all of the podcast platforms, so check us out, tell your friends, please. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:You didn't have to read that, you got it memorized.
Speaker 1:I'm getting pretty good at it. We're 30 something episodes in.
Speaker 2:I think we're going through it we're doing pretty good.
Speaker 1:So if we talk about something today, you have a question about it or any of our episodes, certainly feel free to email us podcast at papertrailscom and we will be happy to either get you an answer or get you in the right direction. So, ai, john, I think a lot of folks, small businesses in particular probably maybe a little scared about using AI.
Speaker 2:Right, the rise of the machines Like Terminator, taking us over in a couple of years.
Speaker 1:But the good thing so far is that, with the AI tools that are out there, you still have to have some human interaction right. You can't just there's not, set it and forget it. It's pretty impressive what these things can do for us, but you still have to be controlling.
Speaker 2:Right, right, and it's funny that you just real quick. It's funny that you said that people are scared of it. I was at we were at a conference a couple months ago and there was a presentation on AI and it started off by showing us a TV and people were scared when the TV came out. A radio people were scared when the radio came out. The internet when the internet came out, people, what's this going to do? So not that AI might be a little bit scary in some of those things, but I think people are apprehensive at first when new technologies like this come out, until they feel or learn how they can leverage it to help them out.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the fears is that it's going to take jobs.
Speaker 2:Right, which, like you had talked about, right now we still need a human to kind of manipulate it. So, at least for now, and I think going forward, it's not going to really replace jobs because we're going to still need that human to manipulate it. I think it's just going to help make people's jobs that much easier and more efficient, right.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's how we use it. Yeah, and you know not only that, as things have evolved, new careers have evolved, with that right, the requirement of managing these types of tools has been there, right, I mean, christ, we had, you know, tv, but when there was first TV, now, look at the industry that TV has created, right, the industry that radio has created, the industry that the internet has created.
Speaker 1:Along with that, and there is industry following into, the AI tools. You know, I mean Apple is putting AI on all of our phones. We've got, you know, all of the software tools that we use our CRM, our graphic design software, everything is now incorporating some sort of AI in there, and you know that's kind of the times that are coming and you know, not even the companies that exist today, but there's so many new companies coming out every day based on software.
Speaker 2:You know that is AI run. I get it. You know sales emails every day saying, oh, use this software, we can help, you know, edit your video, make it sound better, we can help do your podcast. So there's again there's new businesses coming out, so it's actually even potentially creating some businesses and some jobs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you know certainly we've embraced it. And again I come down to the efficiency piece of it. Right, we're busy, we have a lot of clients, we have a lot of work to get done, we have a lot of goals to meet, and you know how do we use these tools.
Speaker 2:What are out?
Speaker 1:there, you know, in marketing, in your role, largely you know I know you're using these tools so that you don't have to work as hard right, you can spend more time on the golf course.
Speaker 2:It's hard to not work hard when you don't work hard.
Speaker 1:No, I'm kidding, I didn't say that, but you know what tools are you using and how are you using them for marketing.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I mean we're going to kind of focus a lot here on marketing. But AI is used across all facets of business, but in terms of marketing, you know, the big one is just chat GPT. What I would do is help.
Speaker 1:And probably the most well-known.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, Probably the most well-known, right yeah 100% and you know I would $20 a month. Well, there's a free version.
Speaker 1:There's a free version which is a little bit more outdated, as I understand. Maybe, not quite as sophisticated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but even for the $20 a month, it's a pretty cheap price, I think, for the value you get out of it because it saves so much time. So if I'm looking to create 100 social media posts for all of our accounts before AI that would generally take me hours to do. That's going to that would. Before AI, that would generally take me hours to do. You know, I got to create a Facebook post, an Instagram post, all that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Now with AI, I can just say, hey, create me a hundred Facebook posts based on payroll, taxes or whatever the topic is, and within minutes I have a hundred posts. Now, yes, I do have to go back into each post and just quickly kind of scan it and making sure that it's speaking to our brand identity, it's speaking to, um, you know, the, the customers we're looking to attract. If they put any statistics in there, then yeah, they're, they're true statistics. We want to fact check that, but but it's just saving me. You know, like I said, it would take me hours. Now it only kind of takes me one hour.
Speaker 1:So it's so much time, so 100% blog posts, most of our blog. You're at least getting an outline for a blog post to help you kind of organize your thoughts, right. What?
Speaker 2:I can do is I can find some information on the internet. I can have it summarize that information for me and then I can say write me an outline for whatever the article is, and it'll provide me an outline and then what I can go in and just fill in under each of those sections in the outline. Just generating ideas is huge and if you're a hospitality business out there, I know my brother's a chef and he'll use it to help him create some ideas for his menus. He says you know, I have steak, I have mushrooms and I have onions, and create me 10 recipes with these three ingredients.
Speaker 1:Other than chicken marsala, exactly.
Speaker 2:Or steak marsala, yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Those weren't great ingredient examples, but it just.
Speaker 1:Is that what you're having for dinner? Is that why you came up with this?
Speaker 2:I don't know, but it's past lunchtime so I am hungry. It just helps that idea generation say you know? Again, it would take him hours to write 10 menu items, different menu items, and now it takes him minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think the other thing with ChatGPT is you have to put a little more energy into it, right? You have to say act as a marketing director for a small business, use this tone of voice, think about these things, include these things, don't include these things. Your quote-unquote prompt is what will drive what you get back, right? I mean, it's kind of the garbage in, garbage out theory right.
Speaker 2:From a marketing standpoint definitely, prompts are huge. Act as a marketer for a small business. You might want to put in there what your customer, your ideal customer, is, their pain points, how you want to speak to them, their tone, and then it'll, you know, generate you what it generates you. But then you've got to go back in again and manipulate, take out this so it's not taking away these jobs, at least right now, because there's someone behind the computer actually typing in these prompts.
Speaker 1:Right. So that's ChatGPT. We use it for a lot, for generating job descriptions. We were updating our job descriptions. I said, hey, this is what kind of company we are, we need a job description to do this role. We had to take it. We had to manipulate it to our format and our culture and put in our benefits, information and so forth. But I can't say that I did that, john did that last week and I actually spent three hours writing half a dozen job descriptions.
Speaker 1:And I spent three minutes writing a job description and it was not quite as good this is the one you asked me to do, chatgpt, and I did it, yeah.
Speaker 2:ChatGPT is my new best friend. Right In five minutes, right Right.
Speaker 1:No. So I mean, I think even on the operations side of things, right, we've used, you know, the Chachi Petit for things I mean again, job descriptions. Our HR consultant will use it to help her generate some policies and procedures and things like that, for not only us but also for our clients. Right, it's a lot easier at least to build the shell and then you put the specifics in right. I need to create a PTO policy for a company of this size in this state, with these requirements and this and that, and come back and you know it'll give you at least the framework for you to go in and customize from there 100% yeah, so we use that.
Speaker 1:We use ChatGPT across the organization. I mean write me a letter, I mean for the podcast, when I guest come on. I said write me a letter to thank my guests for coming on. I thank you email for coming on to the show and it wrote that it gave me what I needed and I had to make a few tweaks and personalize a little bit, but I didn't have to do anything.
Speaker 2:Right, and if you're a service business and you can, you can use those email workflows. You can say create me 10 emails. That I'm, you know, drip campaign. I'm going to be sending off one a week and the good thing is I get it again and keep saying the idea generation. But I think after three or four emails you'd probably run out of things to write about. But a chat GPT is going to come in and, you know, use that human learning that it's. It's learned in the past and give you a good idea for the next email to send in your drip marketing campaign.
Speaker 1:So that's a lot of chat, gpt. What other tools are we using? For what are you using? We have one for the podcast that we use.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the one we use, the podcast, is called Opus clip. It helps turn these long podcasts into short form content videos. All I literally have to do is upload the full file Within 15 minutes. I think I have 30 different short form videos and, again, just like ChatGPT, you have to kind of go in and maybe check the captions. They might be 99% accurate.
Speaker 1:You got to check but it clips the video, it stacks them or edits them. I mean, our videos have multiple angles things like that. It goes and smushes them all together, makes it look good.
Speaker 2:And sometimes it might take a piece from five minutes in the podcast and a piece from 20 minutes in and smush them together, but they make it flow good and it'll start the video with a good opening hook to get better engagement on the video. It's incredible.
Speaker 1:It knows what people will engage with on social media. It says these are the top five clips that we think that you should post.
Speaker 2:It gives you a score and everything that you should post. It gives you a score and everything. The higher the score, the more excited. You get Right.
Speaker 1:We get hashtags, we get descriptions and again, you still have to go manipulate some of that stuff, but you have to go and make sure the captions are correct, make sure the hashtags are relevant or things that you want to be tagging into. All that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So we use that one. We use Canva a lot for e-books or posters or flyers, those kind of things we put together, and they have an AI tool in there to help you create images. All you have to do is put a prompt in. You know, give me a stressed out small business owner behind a pile of paperwork behind their desk. Next thing, you know, you have kind of a little cartoony image, or sometimes you can even get a pretty realistic looking image of that description that you can use across your website and your content.
Speaker 1:But even in Canva you uploaded some headshots that we did that I, you know my, my crappy headshots that I just took, you know, here in the office it went in and fixed the lighting and fixed, you know, made sure you didn't have the background right, the red eye and all that kind of thing right, and you didn't.
Speaker 2:I mean it was done. I have to do the little um tabs up and down and all that. It does it for you in in like 30 seconds Makes you look skinny, that's the Ozempic filter. Exactly the Kardashians would love that one.
Speaker 1:But I mean again, rather than you going into Photoshop and spending 10 minutes truly manipulating a photo, it did it in five seconds.
Speaker 2:Right, and if you don't have an expertise in a certain area, like I, might not be the best photo editor out there, but the AI does a really good job and really quick.
Speaker 1:Right, what else? What else do you get going on for AI? Those are the big ones, right.
Speaker 2:Those are the big ones I think that we use on a daily basis. But going back to our CRM HubSpot, I mean they have AI in their tool and if I need an email written, I can write you know. Hey, chris, how's it going today? Did you read my article yet? Have you reviewed my article yet? And then I can just click expand and AI could make that two-sentence email 300, 400 words if I wanted to. It can change the tone, make it sound more professional. So generally my content doesn't sound professional. They could make it sound that way educational, funny, because I'm not funny, so it can help me with that, those kind of things. It's, it's powerful. So any software that we use today I think across the board has some ai feature in there and it's more and more and more, yeah, every day.
Speaker 1:I mean even our, even our payroll software started to introduce some ai, you know, in that including.
Speaker 2:You probably have more to say about that, but I know like they have it integrated in their predictive analytics so you can predict out future things.
Speaker 1:All ai I was saying that's kind of one of the other operational things. We don't do this as much, but you can give AI tremendous amounts of data and say this is what I'm looking for, right, I'm looking for this outcome and you know I'm looking for this specific decision point. Right, I want to know the average age of every employee that works for all of my clients or whatever right or average rate of pay. It can take that and what would take a human a long time to aggregate that data and figure?
Speaker 2:it out.
Speaker 1:It'll give you responses very quickly.
Speaker 2:And accurate responses. Right For the most part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, Well, that's where I was going next. Actually so accurate for the most part, but we do.
Speaker 2:In terms of the predicting, like the things you were saying in our I solved Right.
Speaker 1:So certainly one of the pitfalls I think that people worry about the most or people have seen the most in AI stuff is, like they call it, hallucinations, and I would say when it gets things wrong, it gets things like really bad. Yeah, it just goes for it, you end up having like an extra appendage, or you know six toes, or you know if you're doing a video, a graphic one again. You may say, show me this dressed out worker behind the desk. For some reason they may have six fingers, something like that.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's been updated recently, but I know, yeah, a month or so ago. They always had trouble with fingers, hands. You get an extra hand, an extra finger somehow.
Speaker 1:So if you're doing AI images, make sure you're checking it for accuracy or it's going to, or come back and you know, say the red sox. You know their home stadium is, you know, dodger stadium or whatever uh it's, it definitely has its hiccups. Uh, it's not perfect, right? So no matter what you are producing, if you're putting that out there the human interaction still needs to be the fact check. Still, you said if it's saying you know 97 marketing directors are lazy, make sure you fact-check that right. Put your bibliography in there.
Speaker 2:I'm in the 97%. No, definitely fact-check it. I think it still owes me $1,000 on the 49ers winning the Super Bowl last year and that didn't happen, so it's not 100% right, but it does a really good job, just as long as you spend a few minutes to fact check it and manipulate it the way you want it to sound for your business.
Speaker 1:You know the other thing that you know we use the things that we use ChatGPT for are generally not proprietary or private information. But there are a lot of ethical concerns about the data security of things that are going into these products, so we are not putting you know any client information in there, and even client names. You know, forget any of that kind of stuff. The things that we're using it for really are the things that are public-facing anyway, it's information.
Speaker 1:Our marketing are things that aren't proprietary, aren't going to be out there. If someone gets a hold of them, it's not the end of the world, right.
Speaker 2:And it's information that's already out there. We're just asking it to summarize it and provide it to us in a much faster time than we would go out there and find it Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Nothing personal, nothing like that Right, no socials, no bank accounts.
Speaker 2:We're probably not asking for any legal advice either. You know things like that, right.
Speaker 1:Same thing and actually, you know, I was talking to our attorney and I said well, gosh, your job just got really easy. It from this bank for this for that. And he's like well, that's still not that easy.
Speaker 1:Right, it's not good it might be someday, but you know, paralegals jobs might be at risk, but who knows? But you know, those are types of real concerns as well, as is the the sensitivity of data that you're pushing through there, Especially if it's not your own proprietary AI technology. If you're using one of these open source tools or something like that, you want to make sure you're not using that. If you're using one of these open source tools or something like that, you want to make sure you're not using that. And then it's the ethical piece. I think there's a lot of ethical questions and concerns about using these tools, whether it's job replacement or even the machine learning, and how do we handle that and manage that and make sure that it isn't Terminator 2.0 or Terminator in real life? I think that's definitely a big concern that a lot of people have too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think, as say, a consumer, just be kind of aware that an answer or something that you could be reading might be AI-generated too, so it wouldn't be necessarily 100%. You've got to trust it. You might still have to go fact-check that yourself, even if someone's sending you this information or you're reading an article and we fact-check ours. So I want to say most of the AI-generated stuff out there is accurate from what we put out there, but someone might not fact-check their AI and just copy and paste it right on their website, so it might not be accurate.
Speaker 1:Well, and there's the weaponization of AI right. I mean, we know that there are tools for voice recognition and using that and creating gosh. The election's coming up. Everyone's worried about election fraud using AI right, because the AI tools are really good. And gosh, there's going to be some inflammatory comment that Joe Biden makes or that Donald Trump makes that could be or they really didn't make that, they really didn't make right that was literally created by Russia and thrown on Facebook and becomes.
Speaker 1:We know that these things go by real fast. So those are some of the ethical concerns, right?
Speaker 2:Using it for bad things, yeah, and this isn't really our realm. But I think eventually there needs to be some kind of you know governmental oversight on it and some policies and procedures put in place to kind of make sure it's being used in an ethical way, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Well, good. Well, that was a good quick little overview of AI stuff. That's how we use things and certainly you know not that we're the model for anything, but I think it's nice to share how we use it in our small business and maybe potentially for other small businesses.
Speaker 2:I definitely think all small businesses should use it in one way or another, whether they use it a lot or a little. They use it a lot or a little, they use it just for idea generation or to save time. Definitely, just jump in and try it out and I don't think it could do any harm if you're using it appropriately and still putting that human touch on it. For sure, and I do think we'll, down the line, probably get into it a little bit more detail in other episodes, but that's just kind of a quick overview of how we use it in our small business.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. If people have questions about AI or how we're using it, how do they get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Yep. So john at papertrailscom. That's J-O-N at papertrailscom. Visit our website, Papertrails, our social media. You can send us a message there and then we have the email podcast at papertrailscom. If you have any questions or thoughts or other comments about AI.
Speaker 1:And you just did my outro for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't do the social part Like.
Speaker 1:follow share rate review subscribe.
Speaker 2:There it is, there it is Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks, everybody. See you next week. Bye. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Small Business, big World. This podcast is a production of Paper Trails. We are a payroll and HR company based in Kennebunk, maine, and we serve small and mid-sized businesses. Don't forget to follow us at at paper trails payroll across all social media platforms and check us out at paper trailscom for more information. As a reminder, the views, opinions and thoughts expressed by the hosts and guests alone. The material presented in this podcast is for general information purposes only and should not be considered legal or financial advice. By inviting this guest to our podcast, paper Trails does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific individual, organization, product or service.
