Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and powerful tools such as ChatGPT are transforming the startup landscape at a frenzied pace, where every minute and resource counts. New businesses can leverage AI on all levels, from streamlining company operations to enhancing customer experiences or unlocking new market opportunities, to ensure startup success across marketing, sales and growth.
In this article, the Brinc team shares five tips to empower startups when implementing AI to maximize business potential. Let’s discover how you can easily take advantage of these cutting-edge tools to fuel your entrepreneurial journey:
1. CREATE MORE THAN TEXT OUTPUT
Besides automated content generation, such as articles, blogs and social-media posts, AI tools can also generate a variety of output formats (such as images, video, graphs and code)… and even understand data.
“By default, ChatGPT replies in plain text,” says Tiffany Tse, Product Manager, Brinc, “Under your guidance, however, your AI tool can provide different media output. For example, to create a presentation, a prompt can ask for “output to be in VBA code” (say, for Microsoft Excel), and then your points for your presentation will be completed within seconds.”
“One of my favorite things about ChatGPT is converting basic text into another format – say, by instructing, ‘format this information into a table’, and it will take care of the rest,” said Nick Zieber, Program Manager (Gaming), Brinc.
Milan Thakkar, Head of Strategy, Brinc also highlights the benefits of learning to use OpenAI APIs: “This thread blew my mind. By integrating ChatGPT into Google Sheets, you can leverage AI to interpret the meaning of data in a cell. Historically, Excel formulas could only understand data and manipulate it, not comprehend its meaning.”
2. DELVE DEEPER INTO DETAILS
Learning and finessing how to get the best results from GenAI is a skill to hone and master. An expert, productive “prompt engineer” uses human judgement and communication skills to refine AI-generated results until the desired outcomes are achieved.
“Your output is only as good as your input, so prompt engineering is key,” says Nikkhil Srinivaas, Senior Program Manager, Brinc India, “Treat your AI tool as a human, even giving them a persona, then position yourself as a project manager for an AI workforce, offering necessary data and detailed instructions. You’ll be so surprised at the results.”
Also, learning to ask smarter questions will help your AI tool be a better problem solver and an innovative partner. Shirley Feng, Program Manager (Blockchain, NFT, and Web3) Brinc mentions, “Always aim to get even more improved answers by asking follow-up questions. Once you get a general answer, be inspired to think deeper, and then try to input more specific context for a more detailed response. Never take the first reply.”
3. PRACTICE YOUR CHAT, LITERALLY
AI chatbots are a great conversation-practice partner that can predict and refine your human-to-human conversations. Elevate your chat game with AI for, say an important meeting, job interview, on-stage Q+A, or startup pitch.
Thakkar says: “Practice asking for specific feedback or trying to predict questions a certain type of person would ask. For example, use it to nail your pitch:”I am a startup focusing on [Insert Business Description] and am currently raising a [Insert $ Amount] [Insert Series Name] funding round. What questions would typical [Insert $ Amount] investors ask me? What would be the areas of my business they are most concerned with? What types of metrics would they be interested in reviewing?, etc.'”
4. VALIDATE AND VERIFY
While AI can significantly help small businesses up their game with reduced cost, time and manpower, it’s important to ensure it is used safely and ethically. It’s important to consider that although AI can certainly act as an independent partner to provide innovative solutions, inform business decisions and give multi-faceted feedback, entrepreneurs must always validate and verify recommendations made by AI systems.
Zieber says: “When it comes to evaluating business processes, use AI to give more than one professional opinion, from other departments – such as legal, accounting, human resources – then cross-check weaknesses or identify blind spots. While AI can work faster, always take time to evaluate the whole situation carefully and analytically. Sometimes, you do need to inject human emotion into translating data.”
Feng explains: “It’s good practice to always evaluate sources of any AI-generated content used in your business or work. This could start by ensuring that a work-process chart includes a human review stage to verify accuracy and reliability.”
5. ADOPT AI TOOLS FOR YOUR SPECIFIC NEEDS
Beyond the popular, big-player likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing, it can certainly be overwhelming to find the correct AI tool for your specific needs and industry, for example, for marketing, video editing, music, art generation, legal, and so on.
For our startup friends, Brinc is currently developing its own entrepreneur-focused AI-powered chatbot, called ‘Co-Founder.’ Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, Co-Founder will also leverage Brinc’s own large language model (LLM) developed through proprietary (but anonymized) data sources from the thousands of companies Brinc has had the privilege of working with this past decade. Co-Founder is currently in its Alpha phase, and interested parties are welcome to apply for access via this interest form.
If you have any interesting tips or hints, we’d love to hear them. Get in touch with our Web3 team via this program interest form.
