Hi

When I was at school it was always the clever kids who knew the right answers. Those of us who were less confident or hadn't fully understood the question just kept quiet and hoped to be ignored by the teacher.

For years, and during my time at university, I thought the secret was knowing the right answers.

It wasn't until after I left university and joined Arthur Andersen that I began to understand how wrong I was. I very quickly learned a word that for almost 50 years has served me well.

That word is ‘why’. I was taught never to take anything at face value and always to question whether there might be a better way.

I was reminded of this by the numerous emails that have arrived in my inbox - as I suspect they have in yours - about artificial intelligence and in particular ChatGPT, which seems to have provoked some controversy in the digital world.

I am clear where I stand. 

Just as there were lots of marketers who ignored e-mail marketing in its early days and saw e-mail as a passing fad, while their competitors started building e-mail lists, emailing their subscribers, and scooping up the target market from their competition, so ChatGPT will have just as significant an effect on businesses, if not more so.

It is important to remember that if the rate of change outside your business is faster than the rate of change inside your business, you're out of business. ChatGPT is one of those here-to-stay technologies just like e-mail and is only going to get bigger.

Entrepreneurial business owners need to know about these tools and how to use them even if that means stepping outside their comfort zone.

Which is why it is important to understand the basic principle of ChatGPT and how it works. It's merely a smart looking, smart sounding collection of algorithms. It isn't sentient, it doesn't understand your questions or its answers. It's just a statistical prediction engine to find the most likely next word based on the data that it's been trained on and its response is depends solely on how you talk to it.

This is why over the coming months you're going to hear a lot about prompt engineering (not prompt as in timely, but prompt as in the thing that elicits an action.)

With ChatGPT the better your prompts are - meaning the better you are at asking the right question - the better results you'll get. The most effective prompts are specific, detailed and grammatically correct with no unexplained jargon.

Which reminded me that what I thought over 50 years ago at school was wrong: answers are easy. It's asking the right questions that is hard.

This is why there is a right and wrong way to use artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT. It should only be used for tasks that you are already capable and qualified to do. It can especially help with tasks that are very time consuming such as writing articles and can save you a vast amount of time. However, you must be able to evaluate and correct its output. 

Using ChatGPT to do things you're not qualified to do will only create unreliable, potentially inaccurate and mediocre-quality information.

Of course, even though you shouldn't use ChatGPT like that some people will do it anyway to churn out content of poor quality, lacking in substance and depth and either inaccurate or incorrect. Discerning accurate from inaccurate information will become a necessary skill across all business activities.

This is why, in a world where everyone is suffering from information overload, business owners will demand a shift to answers that provide for transformation rather than just information.

In the near future the advice and coaching that business owners will want to buy will be that which provides access to legitimate expertise and insight, and discernment that comes with that expertise, while following a journey that leads to a transformation in their business performance.

In my coaching sessions with clients the emphasis is always a upon how we can transform the performance of the business. This is why asking the right questions and being able to interpret the answers will continue to be the key to success.

Noel Guilford

PS I have 3 one-to-one coaching slots opening up; if you – or someone you know – wants to have a conversation to see if we can get you some more fun, flow and freedom in your business book a call with me here.