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It's Time for Success: The Business Insights Podcast
Trailer
Bonus
Episode 4
Season 1
Exploring AI for Small Businesses & Startups with Matt Peck
Host Sharon DeKoning and Matt Peck, Director of Innovation at Startup Lloydminster, discuss how artificial intelligence can support small businesses and startups. Matt highlights the practical uses of AI, from creating social media strategies and writing business plans to providing mentorship. He shares insights on leveraging tools like ChatGPT for generating emails, targeting social media audiences, and developing marketing plans.
Sharon asks questions that most business owners are asking about AI, and how it can help them. Matt answers by highlighting tools, including Microsoft Co-Pilot and Amazely.com. Matt’s message is clear: AI is a valuable resource, and he encourages businesses to explore its potential through free workshops and personalized consultations offered by his team.
Listeners will also learn about Matt’s efforts in building a tech ecosystem in Alberta, covering a broad region to support innovation-focused businesses from concept to funding readiness. His advice for business owners is to start with accessible tools like ChatGPT and gradually integrate AI to streamline operations and enhance decision-making. For those interested in getting started with AI, Matt’s organizations provide resources and hands-on support to help businesses at any stage make the most of these evolving technologies.
About Matt Peck
Matt Peck is the Director of Innovation at Startup Lloydminster and leads the East Central Regional Innovation Network (RIN). In his role with Startup Lloydminster, Matt is dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed by providing tailored support to address their unique challenges. Startup Lloydminster, funded by the City of Lloydminster, is committed to empowering local startups and small business owners as they navigate the complexities of business growth.
In addition to his work with Startup Lloydminster, Matt manages the East Central Regional Innovation Network, a program funded by Alberta Innovates, the research branch of the Alberta government. The RIN program is designed to foster innovation and support tech-driven startups across Alberta. Matt's responsibilities extend across a broad region from Lloydminster to surrounding communities such as Wainwright, Provost, Vermilion, Saint Paul, and Bonnyville. His work focuses on supporting tech and innovation-focused businesses, helping them develop from initial ideas to stages where they may qualify for Alberta Innovates' non-dilutive funding.
Through initiatives like AI workshops and technology integration strategies, Matt actively contributes to strengthening Alberta's tech ecosystem, ensuring that regional businesses have access to the tools and knowledge needed to advance and succeed in an evolving market.
Resources discussed in this episode:
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Contact Sharon DeKoning | It's Time Promotions:
- Website: itpromo.ca
- LinkedIn: Sharon DeKoning
- Facebook: It’s Time Promotions
- Google: It’s Time Promotions
Contact Matt Peck | Startup Lloydminster:
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Transcript
Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:16] Thank you for joining us today on the It's Time for Success: The Business Insights Podcast. Today we got Matt Peck. Matt I had met at an AI luncheon, or actually it was an afternoon, I think. How long was that course, three hours?
Matt Peck: [00:00:29] It's about two and a half, three hours. Basics of AI workshop.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:33] Basics of AI workshop. I took so many notes and that was at Startup Lloydminster. Matt is the Director of Innovation with Startup Lloydminster and leads the East Central Regional Innovation Network. If you could chat a little bit about those two organizations with us, Matt, before we jump in.
Matt Peck: [00:00:55] Yeah for sure. Startup Lloyd is funded by the city of Lloydminster to help small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed. Understanding that every small business is a little bit different, facing different challenges. Then the Regional Innovation Network is funded by Alberta Innovates. Alberta Innovates is the research arm of the Alberta government. They've broken up Alberta into eight different regions, or RINs as we call them, our regional innovation network. There's one in Edmonton and Calgary, but then there's six rural RINSs. I cover the east central Alberta RIN. We're based in Lloydminster, but we cover about 150km into Alberta in every direction. Wainwright, Provost, Vermilion, Saint Paul, Bonnyville, Aklavik, all those communities. We have two goals with the RIN to support tech and innovation startups. Anywhere from that idea-on-a-napkin stage, if it's to do with tech or innovation, our goal with the RIN is to get them ready to potentially receive Alberta Innovates funding. There's quite a bit of non-dilutive funding through Alberta Innovates to support innovation in our province, which is really cool, and then also to support the tech ecosystem within our province as well. For me, part of that has been these AI workshops. Maybe it's setting up companies with a Google profile, maybe it's working with an existing company to see how they can incorporate new technology to advance. That tech ecosystem piece, we do a lot of research to see what company needs, what our region needs. Then we work for Alberta Innovates and provide those supports.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:02:30] That is so in depth. If somebody has any questions how do they find you at any of those places? On a website, do they email, how do they get hold of all that?
Matt Peck: [00:02:39] Through the Startup Lloyd website or the Central Alberta Regional Innovation Network website, there'd be contact. You can fill out a form through that, and then one of us will reach out. From there you should be able to find my contact details as well and reach out to me directly. Things change very quickly and so typically it's easiest to speak with one of our team directly, as we're typically up to date on what programs are currently available, what's the focus at the moment from the Alberta government, things like that. We are the best resource, so go through the website and find us from there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:03:08] So they would reach out to you, not only startup businesses, people that are wanting to grow their business. Who reaches out to you for businesses?
Matt Peck: [00:03:16] We work with businesses at any stage. Like I said, that idea on a napkin stage, but then all the way through working with starting, scaling and then succession planning as well. Sometimes businesses need help with shutting their doors and going through that process too. We have contacts all throughout the province to support at any stage of that. We have our business coach, Holly Andony, who has worked with hundreds, dare I say, thousands of businesses over the years at all different stages and has a really good grasp of what resources are available to help people out. A bit of it is wayfinding, figuring out what tools, what programs there are, what grants are available to help support businesses. We come in at any stage that a business wants help with.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:04:02] Perfect, love it. Today our subject is AI, so let's briefly explain what AI is to our listeners.
Matt Peck: [00:04:13] It's this big buzzword at the moment, but it's been around for a while. Artificial intelligence in the last few years, our large language learning models have become very popular, but AI has been around for a long time. Think predictive text on your phones, decades ago autocorrect on Microsoft Word, things like that. We've had these learning models around for quite a long time, but recently we've seen a huge influx of new programs, new tools. The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI a few years ago, back in 2021 I believe it was, was a huge shift in the way people are able to use AI and a massive advancement in what it can do. The last few years is where it's gotten really busy.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:04:59] So what can AI do for a business owner, let's simplify it. What can it do?
Matt Peck: [00:05:07] The simplest and easiest way is using a chatbot. If you're a business owner, getting onto a chatbot. A couple options there is ChatGPT, whether you're a Microsoft or a Google person, you'd probably be seeing those chatbots when you jump online now as well. There's Gemini and Copilot, too. Getting onto a chatbot and start playing around with it, is the first step for a business owner. Explain to a chatbot what your business does, put some information in there, the more information you can put into the chatbot, the more it can help you out. Jump on ChatGPT, explain your business and ask it something that you're struggling with, would be a great first step for business owners.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:05:47] What are some wins that you've seen businesses use? Any stories that you can share with us?
Matt Peck: [00:05:56] Social media is one of the biggest easy wins for business owners. I know social media can be such a headache for some people, especially if you're not too into social media yourself. I've seen businesses create their entire social media strategy using a chatbot. It will make their 2 to 3 posts a week for them, and all the businesses are doing is just copying and pasting those into their meta suite to then make all their social media posts. One really cool, we work with a Ukrainian lady here in Lloydminster who runs her own restaurant, she was having quite a lot of anxiety around posting on social media as her English wasn't incredible. It would take her a long time to create a post and then she would be proofreading it, trying to double check her English because she felt it would be really unprofessional to post with broken English. Now she interacts with ChatGPT in Ukrainian and it creates English social media posts for her. We have seen a huge growth in her online following, she's so confident in her posting. She went from posting once every couple of weeks to posting multiple times a week. It's been massive for her business, so that's one of the coolest wins I've had.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:07] That's really cool. So you put it in ChatGPT, copy/paste and then put it into your platforms, that's the idea of it. Some of our listeners are terrified of technology, but they realize that it's very important. So how can people that are terrified of it, and they know they need it, how can they take advantage of it, do you feel?
Matt Peck: [00:07:30] I think a good first goal is to just sign up for ChatGPT, it's free. You can put ChatGPT into a Google search and then log in, it's going to ask you to create an account, but it's free to use. There is a paid version that offers a few more services, but it's definitely not something that anybody needs and the technology is absolutely crazy. With the workshops, I've done over ten of these basics of AI workshops, quite a lot of these workshops people have come in with absolutely no experience on AI before, and our first goal is to get them asking a couple questions on there. Have AI plan your dream seven day vacation for you and just say, I would like to travel for seven days in Europe, can you create me a schedule. Then start to work back and forth, get comfortable talking to AI almost like it's a person. I think people struggle with thinking ChatGPT is a Google search, whereas it's more of a tool that you can go back and forth with. That's my encouragement. Get on there, sign up, ask it a question, and then get familiar with how it responds and how it can help you.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:08:35] That's on your phone, desktop, you can access it anywhere.
Matt Peck: [00:08:38] Yeah for sure. There's apps either through the iOS store, through Android as well, or you can just Google ChatGPT.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:08:46] I think I went to do it once back in the day, for ChatGPT, and I think there was a paid version. So you got to watch for that paid version if you do the app, right?
Matt Peck: [00:08:55] For sure. There are quite a few scams with the paid, offering essentially the same model, but they'll ask for paid versions way earlier. You should never have to pay for ChatGPT.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:09:07] Good clarification, thank you for that very much. One thing I learned from you at that course as well, and I've been utilizing it a lot. I have ChatGPT, but because I have different focus points, I need help from ChatGPT. You had mentioned in that course to keep using the same subject line. Can you explain a little bit about that, and why?
Matt Peck: [00:09:29] It's interesting, actually. ChatGPT has updated since that course. For a while there, every new chat that you had, every time you opened a new chat, it would start blank. It would start with no prior understanding. What ChatGPT has done now, is that it's starting to remember every conversation you have with it, on your own profile. The more information you're able to give ChatGPT, the better it's going to be able to help you, and now that's across every single different chat that you have. Explaining what you do for work, explaining your business, explaining some of your struggles, some of your successes, regardless of where that information is on your account. If you've asked it a question on your social media two weeks ago, and then you open up a new chat now and ask it a question on maybe how to get more customers, it's going to remember everything about your business that you put in those two weeks ago, which is really cool. The more you use it, the more it's going to know things about you and about your businesses to help you out.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:10:30] I find it even adjusts the feedback. I did notice that, I think it was, last week. I use it for things like the podcast that we're on right now, it's time promotions and I do my Product Tuesday video. I have these things going on and it does actually calculate it all. I was like, that's really cool. I didn't realize that they updated that, that's really nice so thank you for that.
Matt Peck: [00:10:50] They updated it and I didn't know they'd updated it. I was mid-workshop explaining exactly what I'd explained, you need to open a new chat for it to create a new memory, and then I realized that they'd updated it and that wasn't the case anymore. I had to pivot mid-workshop and learn on the fly with the people who were in it.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:11:11] It's wicked smart. That's another thing too, my team, before we opened up a ChatGPT through its time promotions. But now you know it's free, so open up your own. What we're finding is, it adjusts the wording to speak like you. It's kind of creepy.
Matt Peck: [00:11:28] Yeah, absolutely. The more it understands how you like to interact, the more it's going to model itself and figure things out. For me, I've been able to get it to write my own emails and actually sound like me, which I think is a huge piece to it. You can see text online where it's so clearly written by AI, but if you know how to interact with it, if you're comfortable interacting with it, eventually it's going to sound very similar to how you like to speak. That's where the real power is, if you can use it as a tool and people aren't going to actually know it's AI, then we're winning.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:12:04] Also with AI, it's a tool. Can you explain, I know for a fact people are copying and pasting, what's the downfall for that? Is there a downfall for that?
Matt Peck: [00:12:18] As in copy/pasting responses from ChatGPT?
Sharon DeKoning: [00:12:21] For example, ChatGPT, if I was to copy and paste a social media post exactly as it is, will Facebook not post it? They'll post your post but does it still generate properly on the algorithm?
Matt Peck: [00:12:41] In terms of that, it's fine for the algorithm. Typically, because people are using ChatGPT for their social media, they may be more likely to post that a little bit more often. Frequency of posting on social media is the big win for your algorithm. If they're ChatGPT just copy pasted responses, but it means you're now posting 2 to 3 times a week, it's going to be better off. Where the dangers are, is how the consumer sees it. As you're scrolling through your own social media, like I said, there's times where I see a post and I know for sure they've just copy pasted it straight from ChatGPT. But is it informative? Is it giving me the information I need? Typically it's laid out very clearly and done in a professional manner. Sometimes social media posts, yes, everyone's going to know it's AI and you can workshop that a little bit to have it be a little bit more funny, a little bit more casual, things like that. But if it's providing the information it needs and it's going to get you posting that little bit more often, there's more benefits than dangers, I guess is my advice.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:13:42] Perfect, thank you for that. I've heard different comments on that. One thing also at your course I picked up, that was one of my key takeaways is, sometimes I'm sitting there and it's almost like writer's block. I don't even know what to ask ChatGPT for it to spill something out. You had a comment to ask GPT to ask, what should I ask it? Does that make sense?
Matt Peck: [00:14:09] Yeah, for sure. That's starting to get comfortable with prompting with ChatGPT. When you're asking it questions, the way you word your questions is going to be able to influence the answers that you get. I'm the same as you, I suffer from a creativity block, I guess I'll call it. I'll sit there with the blank email, I'll sit there needing to help with a business plan, and I just struggle to get started. Once I'm going, then I'm golden. Even going into ChatGPT and saying, can you help me write this email, ask me some questions on what I need to include. Then ChatGPT is going to say, what are two points that you want to cover in this email, or, what information do you want to provide? You don't need to write to ChatGPT professionally. You can say, I need to let this person know I want to see them next week sometime in the afternoon. Then it's going to take that tiny little note and create the email for you, and then you can work backwards from there. Either you take the two paragraph email that it's created and edit it yourself, or then you go back and forth with ChatGPT and say, rewrite it, I actually think I want to meet Wednesday afternoon and I want them to bring their business partner with them. Then it's going to rewrite the email. For me, instead of having that blank slate trying to start myself, I get ChatGPT to almost finish what I want it to do. It's not going to be perfect, but then I'll edit backwards from there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:15:34] Wow. Okay, so that was one key takeaway. Another thing I learned is, it doesn't have feelings. Even when I talk to ChatGPT I say, sorry, thank you. I don't know if that's inbred with us, but it doesn't have feelings. You can ask it to correct itself or change and it's not going to hurt its feelings. So that really resonated with me.
Matt Peck: [00:15:56] I'm the same, I use my manners with ChatGPT, still. There's actually a setting in ChatGPT, and I can't believe I'm admitting this, you can customize some of the responses. If you want ChatGPT to never tell you that it's an AI model, you can put it in the custom settings, and then every single response is going to keep those instructions in mind. One of my custom settings is, I want you to end on a positive note with every single response you give me. I'm having ChatGPT help me with a volleyball practice plan or something, and at the bottom it will say, this is going to be such an amazing practice, you're going to do so well.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:16:40] But why wouldn't you? That's awesome. That's exciting, I'm going to go play with that, actually. Oh my goodness. Okay, so somebody just starting up, so you can ask it questions to help you get creative, so that's really smart. You can use it for social media, you can create it for emails, what else do people use the platform for in business?
Matt Peck: [00:17:01] Writing their first business plan is a huge one that a lot of new startups struggle with. That business plan is your first step. If you need financing, you're going to need a pretty complete business plan. It's very intimidating for new businesses to get that written. There's templates online for sure, but I encourage people to use ChatGPT to help write their business plan. The best way you can do that would be simply starting with, I need to write my business plan, can you ask me one question at a time that I will answer until you have enough information that you need to write my business plan for me.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:17:37] I hope somebody is writing that down, because that's good, that's really good. Ask one question at a time until it's done.
Matt Peck: [00:17:45] Again, you only need to provide it with the information, and then ChatGPT is going to make everything professional from there. If it asks, who is your ideal customer, then you can say, I have a cleaning company, so my ideal customer is a mother of boys who play hockey, who need their equipment cleaned. That's all you need to provide ChatGPT, but then it's going to extend it out for your business plan and turn that small note into 2 or 3 sentences and expand on it for you. It helps with people who struggle to write professionally, or don't feel comfortable writing professionally. All you need to provide is the information, those dot points, and then it's going to extend everything out for you. I like to encourage people to use it for their business strategy as well. Okay, your sales are down this month or things aren't going so well. Put it into ChatGPT and say, I need you to help me understand where we're going wrong. Then ChatGPT is going to ask you ten different questions on different aspects of your business. When are you most busy? When are you guys open? What field are you in? Are you marketing to the right customer? Things like that. You'd be able to put some information into ChatGPT and then say, what do you think? ChatGPT is going to say, actually I think you need to be open in the evenings, and I think you need to advertise through certain Facebook groups, or you need to go out and find you're not advertising to your ideal customer. Maybe you're advertising to parents when more you need to target your advertising to young adults. Just putting that information in there and then seeing what it thinks, it's a free mentor for you. The more information you put into it about your business, the more it's going to be able to help you and explain things for you. I encourage people to use ChatGPT before things get bad. Use it as you're going in your daily business life, share it's successes, share where things are going wrong and see how it can help you.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:19:46] Wow okay, so the first point was a business plan. That one is called? (Mentorship) Mentorship, okay. All right I got that, what else?
Matt Peck: [00:19:59] One cool thing I've seen people do is, they'll have information with their business, but then they'll say to ChatGPT, you're my CEO so I am going to provide you with a bunch of questions that we have as a company. We need to figure out what direction we're going in. You are the CEO, I want you to provide your recommendations on what we should do. Whether that be expansion, hiring a new employee, things like that. You can put ChatGPT at the table during some of your business meetings. You can just turn on 'record' and let it listen to some of the discussions you guys are having, and then turn to it at the end of a meeting. Say you're meeting with your three members of management and discussing some issues that are going on. Turn on record, let ChatGPT listen to it all, and then at the end you can ask it and say, what do you think? You're not always going to agree with ChatGPT, but it's another unbiased opinion that's trying to help you out. It's an interesting perspective sometimes to get, and sometimes it's able to give other perspectives that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of, which I think that's really cool. People are using that as their executives to help them make decisions.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:21:05] This podcast is so selfish of me because it's meant for listeners, but I am taking away so many cool points. This is awesome, that is so fantastic. I had a girl that worked for me and she didn't like shopping, she didn't like cooking, so she would punch in, I have this, this and this for an ingredient and create a meal.
Matt Peck: [00:21:26] Absolutely, I'm the same.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:21:29] That is so funny, the depth of it. Another thing I'm picking up on this, I'm in the promotional products industry, it doesn't matter what business you're in, AI can adjust. If you're in agriculture, if you're in oil, it can do whatever, it'll adjust to whatever.
Matt Peck: [00:21:45] The range of things that it can help an individual with, incredible. Again, that's why I encourage people once you get started and once you understand how it can maybe help you in in one topic, if you're ever unsure if ChatGPT can help you out, ask it the question. Sometimes it's not going to help you out to the amount that you want, but sometimes it's going to be amazing for you. I use it in my professional setting the most, but I also have ChatGPT make a lot of my volleyball practice plans, it's my volleyball guide as well. You look at the difference between writing a professional email or planning a volleyball practice, two completely different things but those are the two keys for me. Depending on what industry you're in or what you need help with, see if ChatGPT can help you out, because you might find there's 4 or 5 things in your daily life that the ChatGPT is amazing for, but you've never asked it the question, so you don't know how to get started there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:22:41] I'm the president of our BNI group here in Lloydminster, and I use it even to help me get our meeting ready, suggestions for my meeting. It'll help me with my meeting agenda.
Matt Peck: [00:22:53] These programs are going to get better and better. The chatbots are the simple ones, but we're starting to see in our meetings, say you're in a teams meeting, there'll be an extra copilot which is Microsoft's chatbot, an extra copilot bot in there that's going to listen to the whole meeting and then take notes and summarize things. We have this bot who's in our meetings, and then at the end, as soon as the meeting is done, it sends the summary notes out to all the participants, which is so cool. It takes away the role of a note taker, which means everyone can be engaged. Those extra little tools, they're coming, they're getting better and better. One thing I like to say to people is, this is the worst this technology is ever going to be right now, and it's only going to get better from here. In 12 months, there's going to be even more tools, and it's going to be even more impressive than it is now.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:23:48] We use Zoom, so I've seen the same thing on there and I've never activated it. I should probably do that because we have, from it's time promotions, we do zoom meetings because we have a couple locations. We don't have it activated, I should probably look into that.
Matt Peck: [00:24:04] It's really cool, very handy. I'm bad at taking notes, so it's nice when I have the AI do it for me. It helps me remember some things in the meeting that I otherwise may have forgotten.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:24:13] One of the questions that I had written down is, how can AI enhance marketing strategies? We did talk about social media and how you can ask it questions and put it into your marketing, but it says here, improve targeting. How can you ask ChatGPT to improve it in your social media or target market?
Matt Peck: [00:24:33] You got a couple options. Typically you can plug in some of your social media posts that you've made, or explain your current social media strategy, and be very honest with it. I'm posting two times a week on Instagram and Facebook, and then these are a couple of my posts that I've made. Give it the information on what you're currently doing and say, what do you think? Then it's going to give it's honest feedback and maybe the wording of some of your posts that it won't agree with, or maybe it will recommend, you're trying to promote to business professionals, why aren't you on LinkedIn, or things like that. It's going to give you some ideas, so give it your current strategy and say, what do you think? Or you can get it to start from scratch. If you don't want to give it what you've already done, you can start from scratch and say, from what you already know about my business, or maybe you need to explain your business and your industry, what do you think an ideal marketing plan would look like for me? Who is my ideal customer? What is my ideal social media strategy? Should I be doing radio? Newspaper? If you say, I'm from Vermillion, what's my ideal marketing strategy? It's going to give you something different than if you say, I'm from Calgary, what's my ideal marketing strategy? Because we know in Vermillion, the newspaper, the radio, those ads, they're worth more in those smaller communities than they would be in Calgary or the bigger center like that. Again, it's something people don't think about, but the more information you can give it, it's going to tailor things specifically to you, which is where you can get so much more benefit than googling 'I need a marketing plan', because that's so general. It's going to give you the most generic thing that's not necessarily the best for your individual company and your needs.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:26:15] You're going to have first two pages of sponsored ads that aren't even relevant. When you Google it and it's not what you're looking for, for sure. It says here, share some affordable AI solutions, but we talked about ChatGPT and it is free, we don't need the paid version. Like your ROIs, are there any other platforms that a business could maybe look into?
Matt Peck: [00:26:41] There's two that I would recommend. I don't pay for any anything AI myself, I've never found that I need to, but there's a couple I'm now getting tempted to. Microsoft Copilot now offers AI incorporation into Office 365 and all of the Microsoft programs. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, things like that, AI is now in those in their paid version. I'm not sure who's our Excel gurus, but for me, where I'd think about that, is I could have Excel open, say I need you to create me a formula, I need to sum these numbers and put them into a graph, make the formula for me. Rather than looking online at what the Excel formula is, I can just ask AI right there and it's going to do it for me. Even for PowerPoint, I need to make a ten slide presentation on our strategic plan, here's our strategic plan, make me the PowerPoint. Now you're not starting from scratch, you're starting from a complete PowerPoint and you can go back and edit it from there, which is crazy.
Matt Peck: [00:27:46] Again, in 12 months, those basic versions I think are going to be free. Typically they upgrade and then they have the last version become free from there. I'm curious if Microsoft's going to gatekeep this behind us and make us pay, but we'll see. Then the other one that, I know of one that exists, I think this is coming down the pipeline and it's going to be huge, is having an AI tool be your full social media content creator for you. There's a website called amazly.com, which was made by an Australian man. I actually read a lot of his background and why he created it, I was so interested. An Australian man whose friend was running a cafe, she knew the importance of social media, so she had an awesome presence online, but between running the cafe, staffing and all of the social media, she had no time left in the day, and so she was spending so much time on their social media strategy. They were seeing results, but it was too much work for her to juggle everything at once. Which, with the businesses I speak to, that probably sounds familiar to a lot of you.
Matt Peck: [00:28:53] So he created this tool for her where it would go through their social media profile, see the types of posts that they're making currently. It'll go through their website, it will go through Google and find images of the store, it will pull everything it can online. Then it will start making all of your social media posts for you, it will schedule them through your meta suite, and all she needed to do was go in and approve the posts as they were already created. All she's doing is signing in, seeing the posts that are already mirrored as to what she was already doing, and clicking yes I approve to post that. Her social media time went from ten hours a week, down to about half an hour, and it didn't change much because it already had all the information it needed. It had already gone through and seen what their current strategy was. That's one tool I think they're going to get better and better. I could see in 12 months, businesses are paying $30 a month to have an AI tool do their social media for them.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:29:54] I'm going to date myself. I started 'its time' about 20 years ago, and back in the day we had dial up for internet and we didn't really have much for resources to do all this kind of stuff. Even finding suppliers. YouTube wasn't even a thing, you know how much I learn on YouTube? It wasn't even a thing, how in the heck did we do it? Business people out there, embrace all these resources. They're here, they're available, and if you have any questions, do you instruct at Startup Lloyd on any of these things that we just talked about, like AI, or do you just do those courses. Could they meet with you one on one?
Matt Peck: [00:30:36] I run the 'basics of AI' workshop every few months, depending on how many people are asking about it, but I am always available to sit down and chat with anybody in our region about AI and help them figure out the solutions for them. I love this so much. One of my greatest joys in my work at the moment is helping somebody understand how they can use it for their business, for themselves, things like that. I am more than happy to take some time to help people out through the Regional Innovation Network to see how it can help them. Sometimes just that conversation is going to help you get started, and like I keep saying, once you get started then you're going to start to think about other ways you can use it, and your rolling from there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:31:21] You gave us some quick tips, do you have any blogs out there or any tips out there? We chatted and it was great and I hope people listen to this over and over, and I'm going to get you back because there's so much knowledge there, but is there anywhere that they can go to find out how to even use ChatGPT, these quick tips that you gave?
Matt Peck: [00:31:53] Yeah, for sure. A lot of what I go through, I learned online myself. It was a lot of learning through trial and error, so there's a little bit of a knowledge base that I've just come across as I've been using it. A lot of the tools I learned from YouTube videos, a YouTube video '20 tips for ChatGPT', things like that. There are some very informative videos out there that I used to supplement what my experience was. I think that's a great starting point is, we can go back or you can go in and say to ChatGPT itself, how do you recommend I learn how to use you? Then it's going to give you some tools itself, it's maybe going to send you to a YouTube video itself, or maybe send you to an article, or maybe just walk through the very basics. Again, if you're unsure how to use it, ask it and then it's going to help you out.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:32:46] That is hilarious, I love it so much. Thank you very much for joining us. A couple of the key things I want to touch on again before we sign off, business plan, absolutely brilliant. The mentorship idea, if you're on a growth cycle or you're needing help or sales are down, literally ask it questions, use it as your mentor. I really picked up on, pretend it's your CEO. Brilliant.
Matt Peck: [00:33:14] It can be such a great tool. Again, you don't need to agree with it all the time. It's just going to give you an unbiased, informative opinion. It's taking information from everything that's been on the internet. It knows a lot, and then just let it see how it can help you.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:33:31] One tip I did too, even for my BNI or my Product Tuesday videos, I'll ask it questions. It comes back really smart, it's really clever, but it doesn't sound like me exactly. So sometimes I ask it to talk to me like I'm 16 or 21 or 12, and that's really cool how you can ask it to do that. It's the same thing, just simpler.
Matt Peck: [00:33:51] Yeah, explain like I'm a teenager trying to learn this for the first time, and then it's going to simplify everything for you. I think that prompting piece, once people get comfortable knowing what to ask, and sometimes that's the hardest thing is knowing what to ask, the more comfortable you can get interacting with it, the better information it's going to give you. So jump on, give it a go, ask it ten random questions and start to get comfortable using it, because it's such a powerful tool.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:34:15] So as of right now, if I open up my ChatGPT, I have on the side of it, I got all these different conversations, that is not necessary anymore. Or is it still?
Matt Peck: [00:34:25] In terms of memory, it's going to remember everything from all of those conversations. You're able to turn that function off if you don't want to have that, but for now it's going to remember everything from multiple different conversations. I still like to have conversations segmented based on their topic. I'm not going to ask it to create a volleyball practice plan, and then in the same conversation, ask it to write an email to a work colleague. That's just for me, for my organization. I know some people who, everything goes in the same chat, they ask it what it needs. That's fine, but I'll have my work emails in one folder, I'll have my volleyball practice plans in one folder, I'll have my business plans that I've helped with in one folder, just to help keep things a little more organized. You don't need to for the memory, but it's helpful a little bit for you to know where everything is.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:35:12] Perfect. Okay, we're going to end this. I can't thank you enough, Matt, for joining us today on our podcast. All those extensions will be put below. We'll have the Startup Lloydminster down below so they can reach out there, and the East Central Regional Innovation Network will be listed there too, so it should be easy access for people to reach out to you down below. So thank you for joining us, and that's it. Maybe we'll have you back, is that okay? If you join us again I'll come up with different questions. Well, I probably don't even have to come up with different questions, it evolves so fast. So anyways, it's very good, so thank you for joining us, Matt.
Matt Peck: [00:35:47] Thank you so much for having me, this was fun.
Transcript
Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:16] Thank you for joining us today on the It's Time for Success: The Business Insights Podcast. Today we got Matt Peck. Matt I had met at an AI luncheon, or actually it was an afternoon, I think. How long was that course, three hours?
Matt Peck: [00:00:29] It's about two and a half, three hours. Basics of AI workshop.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:33] Basics of AI workshop. I took so many notes and that was at Startup Lloydminster. Matt is the Director of Innovation with Startup Lloydminster and leads the East Central Regional Innovation Network. If you could chat a little bit about those two organizations with us, Matt, before we jump in.
Matt Peck: [00:00:55] Yeah for sure. Startup Lloyd is funded by the city of Lloydminster to help small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed. Understanding that every small business is a little bit different, facing different challenges. Then the Regional Innovation Network is funded by Alberta Innovates. Alberta Innovates is the research arm of the Alberta government. They've broken up Alberta into eight different regions, or RINs as we call them, our regional innovation network. There's one in Edmonton and Calgary, but then there's six rural RINSs. I cover the east central Alberta RIN. We're based in Lloydminster, but we cover about 150km into Alberta in every direction. Wainwright, Provost, Vermilion, Saint Paul, Bonnyville, Aklavik, all those communities. We have two goals with the RIN to support tech and innovation startups. Anywhere from that idea-on-a-napkin stage, if it's to do with tech or innovation, our goal with the RIN is to get them ready to potentially receive Alberta Innovates funding. There's quite a bit of non-dilutive funding through Alberta Innovates to support innovation in our province, which is really cool, and then also to support the tech ecosystem within our province as well. For me, part of that has been these AI workshops. Maybe it's setting up companies with a Google profile, maybe it's working with an existing company to see how they can incorporate new technology to advance. That tech ecosystem piece, we do a lot of research to see what company needs, what our region needs. Then we work for Alberta Innovates and provide those supports.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:02:30] That is so in depth. If somebody has any questions how do they find you at any of those places? On a website, do they email, how do they get hold of all that?
Matt Peck: [00:02:39] Through the Startup Lloyd website or the Central Alberta Regional Innovation Network website, there'd be contact. You can fill out a form through that, and then one of us will reach out. From there you should be able to find my contact details as well and reach out to me directly. Things change very quickly and so typically it's easiest to speak with one of our team directly, as we're typically up to date on what programs are currently available, what's the focus at the moment from the Alberta government, things like that. We are the best resource, so go through the website and find us from there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:03:08] So they would reach out to you, not only startup businesses, people that are wanting to grow their business. Who reaches out to you for businesses?
Matt Peck: [00:03:16] We work with businesses at any stage. Like I said, that idea on a napkin stage, but then all the way through working with starting, scaling and then succession planning as well. Sometimes businesses need help with shutting their doors and going through that process too. We have contacts all throughout the province to support at any stage of that. We have our business coach, Holly Andony, who has worked with hundreds, dare I say, thousands of businesses over the years at all different stages and has a really good grasp of what resources are available to help people out. A bit of it is wayfinding, figuring out what tools, what programs there are, what grants are available to help support businesses. We come in at any stage that a business wants help with.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:04:02] Perfect, love it. Today our subject is AI, so let's briefly explain what AI is to our listeners.
Matt Peck: [00:04:13] It's this big buzzword at the moment, but it's been around for a while. Artificial intelligence in the last few years, our large language learning models have become very popular, but AI has been around for a long time. Think predictive text on your phones, decades ago autocorrect on Microsoft Word, things like that. We've had these learning models around for quite a long time, but recently we've seen a huge influx of new programs, new tools. The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI a few years ago, back in 2021 I believe it was, was a huge shift in the way people are able to use AI and a massive advancement in what it can do. The last few years is where it's gotten really busy.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:04:59] So what can AI do for a business owner, let's simplify it. What can it do?
Matt Peck: [00:05:07] The simplest and easiest way is using a chatbot. If you're a business owner, getting onto a chatbot. A couple options there is ChatGPT, whether you're a Microsoft or a Google person, you'd probably be seeing those chatbots when you jump online now as well. There's Gemini and Copilot, too. Getting onto a chatbot and start playing around with it, is the first step for a business owner. Explain to a chatbot what your business does, put some information in there, the more information you can put into the chatbot, the more it can help you out. Jump on ChatGPT, explain your business and ask it something that you're struggling with, would be a great first step for business owners.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:05:47] What are some wins that you've seen businesses use? Any stories that you can share with us?
Matt Peck: [00:05:56] Social media is one of the biggest easy wins for business owners. I know social media can be such a headache for some people, especially if you're not too into social media yourself. I've seen businesses create their entire social media strategy using a chatbot. It will make their 2 to 3 posts a week for them, and all the businesses are doing is just copying and pasting those into their meta suite to then make all their social media posts. One really cool, we work with a Ukrainian lady here in Lloydminster who runs her own restaurant, she was having quite a lot of anxiety around posting on social media as her English wasn't incredible. It would take her a long time to create a post and then she would be proofreading it, trying to double check her English because she felt it would be really unprofessional to post with broken English. Now she interacts with ChatGPT in Ukrainian and it creates English social media posts for her. We have seen a huge growth in her online following, she's so confident in her posting. She went from posting once every couple of weeks to posting multiple times a week. It's been massive for her business, so that's one of the coolest wins I've had.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:07] That's really cool. So you put it in ChatGPT, copy/paste and then put it into your platforms, that's the idea of it. Some of our listeners are terrified of technology, but they realize that it's very important. So how can people that are terrified of it, and they know they need it, how can they take advantage of it, do you feel?
Matt Peck: [00:07:30] I think a good first goal is to just sign up for ChatGPT, it's free. You can put ChatGPT into a Google search and then log in, it's going to ask you to create an account, but it's free to use. There is a paid version that offers a few more services, but it's definitely not something that anybody needs and the technology is absolutely crazy. With the workshops, I've done over ten of these basics of AI workshops, quite a lot of these workshops people have come in with absolutely no experience on AI before, and our first goal is to get them asking a couple questions on there. Have AI plan your dream seven day vacation for you and just say, I would like to travel for seven days in Europe, can you create me a schedule. Then start to work back and forth, get comfortable talking to AI almost like it's a person. I think people struggle with thinking ChatGPT is a Google search, whereas it's more of a tool that you can go back and forth with. That's my encouragement. Get on there, sign up, ask it a question, and then get familiar with how it responds and how it can help you.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:08:35] That's on your phone, desktop, you can access it anywhere.
Matt Peck: [00:08:38] Yeah for sure. There's apps either through the iOS store, through Android as well, or you can just Google ChatGPT.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:08:46] I think I went to do it once back in the day, for ChatGPT, and I think there was a paid version. So you got to watch for that paid version if you do the app, right?
Matt Peck: [00:08:55] For sure. There are quite a few scams with the paid, offering essentially the same model, but they'll ask for paid versions way earlier. You should never have to pay for ChatGPT.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:09:07] Good clarification, thank you for that very much. One thing I learned from you at that course as well, and I've been utilizing it a lot. I have ChatGPT, but because I have different focus points, I need help from ChatGPT. You had mentioned in that course to keep using the same subject line. Can you explain a little bit about that, and why?
Matt Peck: [00:09:29] It's interesting, actually. ChatGPT has updated since that course. For a while there, every new chat that you had, every time you opened a new chat, it would start blank. It would start with no prior understanding. What ChatGPT has done now, is that it's starting to remember every conversation you have with it, on your own profile. The more information you're able to give ChatGPT, the better it's going to be able to help you, and now that's across every single different chat that you have. Explaining what you do for work, explaining your business, explaining some of your struggles, some of your successes, regardless of where that information is on your account. If you've asked it a question on your social media two weeks ago, and then you open up a new chat now and ask it a question on maybe how to get more customers, it's going to remember everything about your business that you put in those two weeks ago, which is really cool. The more you use it, the more it's going to know things about you and about your businesses to help you out.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:10:30] I find it even adjusts the feedback. I did notice that, I think it was, last week. I use it for things like the podcast that we're on right now, it's time promotions and I do my Product Tuesday video. I have these things going on and it does actually calculate it all. I was like, that's really cool. I didn't realize that they updated that, that's really nice so thank you for that.
Matt Peck: [00:10:50] They updated it and I didn't know they'd updated it. I was mid-workshop explaining exactly what I'd explained, you need to open a new chat for it to create a new memory, and then I realized that they'd updated it and that wasn't the case anymore. I had to pivot mid-workshop and learn on the fly with the people who were in it.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:11:11] It's wicked smart. That's another thing too, my team, before we opened up a ChatGPT through its time promotions. But now you know it's free, so open up your own. What we're finding is, it adjusts the wording to speak like you. It's kind of creepy.
Matt Peck: [00:11:28] Yeah, absolutely. The more it understands how you like to interact, the more it's going to model itself and figure things out. For me, I've been able to get it to write my own emails and actually sound like me, which I think is a huge piece to it. You can see text online where it's so clearly written by AI, but if you know how to interact with it, if you're comfortable interacting with it, eventually it's going to sound very similar to how you like to speak. That's where the real power is, if you can use it as a tool and people aren't going to actually know it's AI, then we're winning.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:12:04] Also with AI, it's a tool. Can you explain, I know for a fact people are copying and pasting, what's the downfall for that? Is there a downfall for that?
Matt Peck: [00:12:18] As in copy/pasting responses from ChatGPT?
Sharon DeKoning: [00:12:21] For example, ChatGPT, if I was to copy and paste a social media post exactly as it is, will Facebook not post it? They'll post your post but does it still generate properly on the algorithm?
Matt Peck: [00:12:41] In terms of that, it's fine for the algorithm. Typically, because people are using ChatGPT for their social media, they may be more likely to post that a little bit more often. Frequency of posting on social media is the big win for your algorithm. If they're ChatGPT just copy pasted responses, but it means you're now posting 2 to 3 times a week, it's going to be better off. Where the dangers are, is how the consumer sees it. As you're scrolling through your own social media, like I said, there's times where I see a post and I know for sure they've just copy pasted it straight from ChatGPT. But is it informative? Is it giving me the information I need? Typically it's laid out very clearly and done in a professional manner. Sometimes social media posts, yes, everyone's going to know it's AI and you can workshop that a little bit to have it be a little bit more funny, a little bit more casual, things like that. But if it's providing the information it needs and it's going to get you posting that little bit more often, there's more benefits than dangers, I guess is my advice.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:13:42] Perfect, thank you for that. I've heard different comments on that. One thing also at your course I picked up, that was one of my key takeaways is, sometimes I'm sitting there and it's almost like writer's block. I don't even know what to ask ChatGPT for it to spill something out. You had a comment to ask GPT to ask, what should I ask it? Does that make sense?
Matt Peck: [00:14:09] Yeah, for sure. That's starting to get comfortable with prompting with ChatGPT. When you're asking it questions, the way you word your questions is going to be able to influence the answers that you get. I'm the same as you, I suffer from a creativity block, I guess I'll call it. I'll sit there with the blank email, I'll sit there needing to help with a business plan, and I just struggle to get started. Once I'm going, then I'm golden. Even going into ChatGPT and saying, can you help me write this email, ask me some questions on what I need to include. Then ChatGPT is going to say, what are two points that you want to cover in this email, or, what information do you want to provide? You don't need to write to ChatGPT professionally. You can say, I need to let this person know I want to see them next week sometime in the afternoon. Then it's going to take that tiny little note and create the email for you, and then you can work backwards from there. Either you take the two paragraph email that it's created and edit it yourself, or then you go back and forth with ChatGPT and say, rewrite it, I actually think I want to meet Wednesday afternoon and I want them to bring their business partner with them. Then it's going to rewrite the email. For me, instead of having that blank slate trying to start myself, I get ChatGPT to almost finish what I want it to do. It's not going to be perfect, but then I'll edit backwards from there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:15:34] Wow. Okay, so that was one key takeaway. Another thing I learned is, it doesn't have feelings. Even when I talk to ChatGPT I say, sorry, thank you. I don't know if that's inbred with us, but it doesn't have feelings. You can ask it to correct itself or change and it's not going to hurt its feelings. So that really resonated with me.
Matt Peck: [00:15:56] I'm the same, I use my manners with ChatGPT, still. There's actually a setting in ChatGPT, and I can't believe I'm admitting this, you can customize some of the responses. If you want ChatGPT to never tell you that it's an AI model, you can put it in the custom settings, and then every single response is going to keep those instructions in mind. One of my custom settings is, I want you to end on a positive note with every single response you give me. I'm having ChatGPT help me with a volleyball practice plan or something, and at the bottom it will say, this is going to be such an amazing practice, you're going to do so well.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:16:40] But why wouldn't you? That's awesome. That's exciting, I'm going to go play with that, actually. Oh my goodness. Okay, so somebody just starting up, so you can ask it questions to help you get creative, so that's really smart. You can use it for social media, you can create it for emails, what else do people use the platform for in business?
Matt Peck: [00:17:01] Writing their first business plan is a huge one that a lot of new startups struggle with. That business plan is your first step. If you need financing, you're going to need a pretty complete business plan. It's very intimidating for new businesses to get that written. There's templates online for sure, but I encourage people to use ChatGPT to help write their business plan. The best way you can do that would be simply starting with, I need to write my business plan, can you ask me one question at a time that I will answer until you have enough information that you need to write my business plan for me.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:17:37] I hope somebody is writing that down, because that's good, that's really good. Ask one question at a time until it's done.
Matt Peck: [00:17:45] Again, you only need to provide it with the information, and then ChatGPT is going to make everything professional from there. If it asks, who is your ideal customer, then you can say, I have a cleaning company, so my ideal customer is a mother of boys who play hockey, who need their equipment cleaned. That's all you need to provide ChatGPT, but then it's going to extend it out for your business plan and turn that small note into 2 or 3 sentences and expand on it for you. It helps with people who struggle to write professionally, or don't feel comfortable writing professionally. All you need to provide is the information, those dot points, and then it's going to extend everything out for you. I like to encourage people to use it for their business strategy as well. Okay, your sales are down this month or things aren't going so well. Put it into ChatGPT and say, I need you to help me understand where we're going wrong. Then ChatGPT is going to ask you ten different questions on different aspects of your business. When are you most busy? When are you guys open? What field are you in? Are you marketing to the right customer? Things like that. You'd be able to put some information into ChatGPT and then say, what do you think? ChatGPT is going to say, actually I think you need to be open in the evenings, and I think you need to advertise through certain Facebook groups, or you need to go out and find you're not advertising to your ideal customer. Maybe you're advertising to parents when more you need to target your advertising to young adults. Just putting that information in there and then seeing what it thinks, it's a free mentor for you. The more information you put into it about your business, the more it's going to be able to help you and explain things for you. I encourage people to use ChatGPT before things get bad. Use it as you're going in your daily business life, share it's successes, share where things are going wrong and see how it can help you.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:19:46] Wow okay, so the first point was a business plan. That one is called? (Mentorship) Mentorship, okay. All right I got that, what else?
Matt Peck: [00:19:59] One cool thing I've seen people do is, they'll have information with their business, but then they'll say to ChatGPT, you're my CEO so I am going to provide you with a bunch of questions that we have as a company. We need to figure out what direction we're going in. You are the CEO, I want you to provide your recommendations on what we should do. Whether that be expansion, hiring a new employee, things like that. You can put ChatGPT at the table during some of your business meetings. You can just turn on 'record' and let it listen to some of the discussions you guys are having, and then turn to it at the end of a meeting. Say you're meeting with your three members of management and discussing some issues that are going on. Turn on record, let ChatGPT listen to it all, and then at the end you can ask it and say, what do you think? You're not always going to agree with ChatGPT, but it's another unbiased opinion that's trying to help you out. It's an interesting perspective sometimes to get, and sometimes it's able to give other perspectives that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of, which I think that's really cool. People are using that as their executives to help them make decisions.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:21:05] This podcast is so selfish of me because it's meant for listeners, but I am taking away so many cool points. This is awesome, that is so fantastic. I had a girl that worked for me and she didn't like shopping, she didn't like cooking, so she would punch in, I have this, this and this for an ingredient and create a meal.
Matt Peck: [00:21:26] Absolutely, I'm the same.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:21:29] That is so funny, the depth of it. Another thing I'm picking up on this, I'm in the promotional products industry, it doesn't matter what business you're in, AI can adjust. If you're in agriculture, if you're in oil, it can do whatever, it'll adjust to whatever.
Matt Peck: [00:21:45] The range of things that it can help an individual with, incredible. Again, that's why I encourage people once you get started and once you understand how it can maybe help you in in one topic, if you're ever unsure if ChatGPT can help you out, ask it the question. Sometimes it's not going to help you out to the amount that you want, but sometimes it's going to be amazing for you. I use it in my professional setting the most, but I also have ChatGPT make a lot of my volleyball practice plans, it's my volleyball guide as well. You look at the difference between writing a professional email or planning a volleyball practice, two completely different things but those are the two keys for me. Depending on what industry you're in or what you need help with, see if ChatGPT can help you out, because you might find there's 4 or 5 things in your daily life that the ChatGPT is amazing for, but you've never asked it the question, so you don't know how to get started there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:22:41] I'm the president of our BNI group here in Lloydminster, and I use it even to help me get our meeting ready, suggestions for my meeting. It'll help me with my meeting agenda.
Matt Peck: [00:22:53] These programs are going to get better and better. The chatbots are the simple ones, but we're starting to see in our meetings, say you're in a teams meeting, there'll be an extra copilot which is Microsoft's chatbot, an extra copilot bot in there that's going to listen to the whole meeting and then take notes and summarize things. We have this bot who's in our meetings, and then at the end, as soon as the meeting is done, it sends the summary notes out to all the participants, which is so cool. It takes away the role of a note taker, which means everyone can be engaged. Those extra little tools, they're coming, they're getting better and better. One thing I like to say to people is, this is the worst this technology is ever going to be right now, and it's only going to get better from here. In 12 months, there's going to be even more tools, and it's going to be even more impressive than it is now.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:23:48] We use Zoom, so I've seen the same thing on there and I've never activated it. I should probably do that because we have, from it's time promotions, we do zoom meetings because we have a couple locations. We don't have it activated, I should probably look into that.
Matt Peck: [00:24:04] It's really cool, very handy. I'm bad at taking notes, so it's nice when I have the AI do it for me. It helps me remember some things in the meeting that I otherwise may have forgotten.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:24:13] One of the questions that I had written down is, how can AI enhance marketing strategies? We did talk about social media and how you can ask it questions and put it into your marketing, but it says here, improve targeting. How can you ask ChatGPT to improve it in your social media or target market?
Matt Peck: [00:24:33] You got a couple options. Typically you can plug in some of your social media posts that you've made, or explain your current social media strategy, and be very honest with it. I'm posting two times a week on Instagram and Facebook, and then these are a couple of my posts that I've made. Give it the information on what you're currently doing and say, what do you think? Then it's going to give it's honest feedback and maybe the wording of some of your posts that it won't agree with, or maybe it will recommend, you're trying to promote to business professionals, why aren't you on LinkedIn, or things like that. It's going to give you some ideas, so give it your current strategy and say, what do you think? Or you can get it to start from scratch. If you don't want to give it what you've already done, you can start from scratch and say, from what you already know about my business, or maybe you need to explain your business and your industry, what do you think an ideal marketing plan would look like for me? Who is my ideal customer? What is my ideal social media strategy? Should I be doing radio? Newspaper? If you say, I'm from Vermillion, what's my ideal marketing strategy? It's going to give you something different than if you say, I'm from Calgary, what's my ideal marketing strategy? Because we know in Vermillion, the newspaper, the radio, those ads, they're worth more in those smaller communities than they would be in Calgary or the bigger center like that. Again, it's something people don't think about, but the more information you can give it, it's going to tailor things specifically to you, which is where you can get so much more benefit than googling 'I need a marketing plan', because that's so general. It's going to give you the most generic thing that's not necessarily the best for your individual company and your needs.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:26:15] You're going to have first two pages of sponsored ads that aren't even relevant. When you Google it and it's not what you're looking for, for sure. It says here, share some affordable AI solutions, but we talked about ChatGPT and it is free, we don't need the paid version. Like your ROIs, are there any other platforms that a business could maybe look into?
Matt Peck: [00:26:41] There's two that I would recommend. I don't pay for any anything AI myself, I've never found that I need to, but there's a couple I'm now getting tempted to. Microsoft Copilot now offers AI incorporation into Office 365 and all of the Microsoft programs. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, things like that, AI is now in those in their paid version. I'm not sure who's our Excel gurus, but for me, where I'd think about that, is I could have Excel open, say I need you to create me a formula, I need to sum these numbers and put them into a graph, make the formula for me. Rather than looking online at what the Excel formula is, I can just ask AI right there and it's going to do it for me. Even for PowerPoint, I need to make a ten slide presentation on our strategic plan, here's our strategic plan, make me the PowerPoint. Now you're not starting from scratch, you're starting from a complete PowerPoint and you can go back and edit it from there, which is crazy.
Matt Peck: [00:27:46] Again, in 12 months, those basic versions I think are going to be free. Typically they upgrade and then they have the last version become free from there. I'm curious if Microsoft's going to gatekeep this behind us and make us pay, but we'll see. Then the other one that, I know of one that exists, I think this is coming down the pipeline and it's going to be huge, is having an AI tool be your full social media content creator for you. There's a website called amazly.com, which was made by an Australian man. I actually read a lot of his background and why he created it, I was so interested. An Australian man whose friend was running a cafe, she knew the importance of social media, so she had an awesome presence online, but between running the cafe, staffing and all of the social media, she had no time left in the day, and so she was spending so much time on their social media strategy. They were seeing results, but it was too much work for her to juggle everything at once. Which, with the businesses I speak to, that probably sounds familiar to a lot of you.
Matt Peck: [00:28:53] So he created this tool for her where it would go through their social media profile, see the types of posts that they're making currently. It'll go through their website, it will go through Google and find images of the store, it will pull everything it can online. Then it will start making all of your social media posts for you, it will schedule them through your meta suite, and all she needed to do was go in and approve the posts as they were already created. All she's doing is signing in, seeing the posts that are already mirrored as to what she was already doing, and clicking yes I approve to post that. Her social media time went from ten hours a week, down to about half an hour, and it didn't change much because it already had all the information it needed. It had already gone through and seen what their current strategy was. That's one tool I think they're going to get better and better. I could see in 12 months, businesses are paying $30 a month to have an AI tool do their social media for them.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:29:54] I'm going to date myself. I started 'its time' about 20 years ago, and back in the day we had dial up for internet and we didn't really have much for resources to do all this kind of stuff. Even finding suppliers. YouTube wasn't even a thing, you know how much I learn on YouTube? It wasn't even a thing, how in the heck did we do it? Business people out there, embrace all these resources. They're here, they're available, and if you have any questions, do you instruct at Startup Lloyd on any of these things that we just talked about, like AI, or do you just do those courses. Could they meet with you one on one?
Matt Peck: [00:30:36] I run the 'basics of AI' workshop every few months, depending on how many people are asking about it, but I am always available to sit down and chat with anybody in our region about AI and help them figure out the solutions for them. I love this so much. One of my greatest joys in my work at the moment is helping somebody understand how they can use it for their business, for themselves, things like that. I am more than happy to take some time to help people out through the Regional Innovation Network to see how it can help them. Sometimes just that conversation is going to help you get started, and like I keep saying, once you get started then you're going to start to think about other ways you can use it, and your rolling from there.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:31:21] You gave us some quick tips, do you have any blogs out there or any tips out there? We chatted and it was great and I hope people listen to this over and over, and I'm going to get you back because there's so much knowledge there, but is there anywhere that they can go to find out how to even use ChatGPT, these quick tips that you gave?
Matt Peck: [00:31:53] Yeah, for sure. A lot of what I go through, I learned online myself. It was a lot of learning through trial and error, so there's a little bit of a knowledge base that I've just come across as I've been using it. A lot of the tools I learned from YouTube videos, a YouTube video '20 tips for ChatGPT', things like that. There are some very informative videos out there that I used to supplement what my experience was. I think that's a great starting point is, we can go back or you can go in and say to ChatGPT itself, how do you recommend I learn how to use you? Then it's going to give you some tools itself, it's maybe going to send you to a YouTube video itself, or maybe send you to an article, or maybe just walk through the very basics. Again, if you're unsure how to use it, ask it and then it's going to help you out.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:32:46] That is hilarious, I love it so much. Thank you very much for joining us. A couple of the key things I want to touch on again before we sign off, business plan, absolutely brilliant. The mentorship idea, if you're on a growth cycle or you're needing help or sales are down, literally ask it questions, use it as your mentor. I really picked up on, pretend it's your CEO. Brilliant.
Matt Peck: [00:33:14] It can be such a great tool. Again, you don't need to agree with it all the time. It's just going to give you an unbiased, informative opinion. It's taking information from everything that's been on the internet. It knows a lot, and then just let it see how it can help you.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:33:31] One tip I did too, even for my BNI or my Product Tuesday videos, I'll ask it questions. It comes back really smart, it's really clever, but it doesn't sound like me exactly. So sometimes I ask it to talk to me like I'm 16 or 21 or 12, and that's really cool how you can ask it to do that. It's the same thing, just simpler.
Matt Peck: [00:33:51] Yeah, explain like I'm a teenager trying to learn this for the first time, and then it's going to simplify everything for you. I think that prompting piece, once people get comfortable knowing what to ask, and sometimes that's the hardest thing is knowing what to ask, the more comfortable you can get interacting with it, the better information it's going to give you. So jump on, give it a go, ask it ten random questions and start to get comfortable using it, because it's such a powerful tool.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:34:15] So as of right now, if I open up my ChatGPT, I have on the side of it, I got all these different conversations, that is not necessary anymore. Or is it still?
Matt Peck: [00:34:25] In terms of memory, it's going to remember everything from all of those conversations. You're able to turn that function off if you don't want to have that, but for now it's going to remember everything from multiple different conversations. I still like to have conversations segmented based on their topic. I'm not going to ask it to create a volleyball practice plan, and then in the same conversation, ask it to write an email to a work colleague. That's just for me, for my organization. I know some people who, everything goes in the same chat, they ask it what it needs. That's fine, but I'll have my work emails in one folder, I'll have my volleyball practice plans in one folder, I'll have my business plans that I've helped with in one folder, just to help keep things a little more organized. You don't need to for the memory, but it's helpful a little bit for you to know where everything is.
Sharon DeKoning: [00:35:12] Perfect. Okay, we're going to end this. I can't thank you enough, Matt, for joining us today on our podcast. All those extensions will be put below. We'll have the Startup Lloydminster down below so they can reach out there, and the East Central Regional Innovation Network will be listed there too, so it should be easy access for people to reach out to you down below. So thank you for joining us, and that's it. Maybe we'll have you back, is that okay? If you join us again I'll come up with different questions. Well, I probably don't even have to come up with different questions, it evolves so fast. So anyways, it's very good, so thank you for joining us, Matt.
Matt Peck: [00:35:47] Thank you so much for having me, this was fun.