7 ways I use Chat GPT for business (and finish work before 5pm)

While most of the use cases and chatter about ChatGPT has been about creating blog articles and idea generation, you can actually use the tool to improve your efficiency at work.

You can even leverage it to generate sales leads (more on this below).

In this article, I’ll go over how to quickly sign up for the Openai service and then dive into each of the ways I use it right now at work to get my work done fast (work smarter, not harder, right?)

Key Takeaways

• How to Create an OpenAI account, setup API keys
• Understand the OpenAI pricing models
• 7 unique ways to use it at work or in your business to improve efficiency

Click here to skip right to the 7 ways, if you’re already familiar with Chat GPT.

what is chat GPT

Chat GPT is an artificial intelligence language model that was created by OpenAI. Though there were previous versions, the most popular version was the GPT-3 model that was released on November 30, 2022 with GPT-4 being the current model.

Since then, the software has taken the world by storm and dominated the news cycle for the entirety of 2023, shattering records of user adoption along the way.

What makes the tool particularly useful is simply the way you can converse with it in natural language.

How To Sign Up to Chat GPT (OpenAI account)

To sign up to an Open AI account just follow these steps

1. Go to: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login
2. Click Sign Up and enter your email address or use one of the single sign on options (Google, Microsoft, Apple) and click Continue.
3. Select a strong password and click Continue.
4. After you verify your email, you will see a confirmation

5. After the onboarding screens, you should be at the main chat interface.

Understanding ChatGPT (OpenAI) billing models

There are two main types of billing

• ChatGPT Plus, aka subscription at $20 per month recurring
  • This gives you access to ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0 plus Dall-E and a host of other features at time of this writing
• Pay as you go – only pay what you use; here is the per-use pricing page

You may be wondering what your costs will be like. I would consider myself a “light” user. I use it a few times a day and don’t use it to write long form (over 2k words) blog posts. You can see my highest month was $11.09 which is far from the usual $20 per month if you decide to go the subscription route. I would recommend starting with pay as you go and then keeping an eye on your usage rates regularly so you don’t go over.

Many of the 3rd party tools that will be discussed will use the pay as you go model, meaning you need to add your credit card to the billing page and then create an API key from your OpenAI account in order to use the tools – discussed in the next section.

The Subscription model provides access to the easy to use User Interface that OpenAI has created for their ChatGPT product.

You can read more about the subscription here.

Setting up Pay as you Go billing and Creating API keys

After you’ve signed up to an OpenAI (chatGPT) account, go to the billing page. Add a payment method if one doesn’t already exist.

Next go to the API key page and Create a new secret key. It’s also helpful to name it something useful, usually the name of the 3rd party app you will use that particular key for.

You could use the same key for multiple apps, but if you want to stay more organized, just make separate keys.

Now you will be ready to use these methods discussed below.

7 ways to effectively use chat GPT at work or for your business

1. read contracts like a lawyer

Requirements: Free ChatGPT or higher

Depending on the industry you work in, you may have a need to read through several contracts on a regular basis.

Luckily for you, if you don’t have an in house counsel, you can take advantage of Chat GPT’s brain.

Before you begin, I find it helps to prime it with context. You can use this prompt:

I need your help reading a series of contracts for my project.
This project consists of video editors, script writers and producers.
I will paste the contents of their contracts into the next chat and I want you to read and understand the contract. Afterward I will ask specific questions.

Do you understand?

You should get a response like the one below:

Yes, I understand. I can help you with reading and understanding the contents of the contracts related to your project involving video editors, script writers, and producers. Once you paste the contents of the contracts, I'll review them and then you can ask specific questions about them. Please go ahead and paste the text of the contracts.

Next, simply follow through with the directions you gave it. Give it context of the contract. There are a couple of options for this step:

• You can copy and paste text directly from a PDF
• or you can convert your PDF to word and then copy it
• If you have the subscription version of GPT you can upload the entire PDF directly without having to convert the PDF or copy and paste text, but it is not required to have the subscription to execute this method.

Next, you can ask Chat GPT specific questions about your contract like:

• List the Deliverables and Responsibilities in a table for this contract such that this person would have an easy-to-follow timeline for project management purposes
• What are the payment terms for this contract along with payment deadlines? List any milestones associated with payment dates if applicable and include any rates
• Who owns the intellectual property rights after the work has completed? If there isn’t a clause covering this, please write me one that I can use as a baseline for the contract
• What are the confidentiality and non disclosure clauses
• What happens if either party terminates the contract
• What other questions have I not asked yet that might be important as a production manager?

This last question is particularly powerful because it allows you to open a loop of more critical questions that you can then feed back into this same chat session sure your contract is air tight.

2. Tag / Categorize rows in Google Sheets or Microsft Excel

Requirements: Pay as you go billing setup for OpenAI with API key

Sometimes, in my workflow, I need to categorize expense items quickly. I can quickly do this manually when I have 10-20 rows.

But what happens when you have hundreds of expense items you need to categorize for your accountant?

That’s where using Chat GPT within Google Sheets comes in handy.

First, watch this video below so you can see what the outcome looks like. In Column D, I have 30 expense categories. And in Column A, I have 115 expense line items.

I want Chat GPT to match the Category in Column D with the expense line in Column A and output the ideal category into Column B.

Click below to watch a quick demo.

To get set up:

• First go here for a getting started guide by the developer (Microsoft Excel users can use this doc)
• Make sure you set up your API key for the plugin (remember that API key you created earlier? This is the time to use it)
• You can see the full list of features and functions along with the syntax

You can download a copy of my google sheet (you’ll need a google email) if you want sample data to practice on, but the developer also provides his own.

Edit: Here is formula from my specific google sheet (there was a small mistake in the video above)

=GPT_CLASSIFY(A2,D$2:D$31)

3. Create Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel Formulas

I used to spend hours trying to get formulas correct for google sheets. This is a problem of the past with ChatGPT.

Let’s say you have a list of dates and times in this ISO date, and time format listed below, but you want to label them by Month (ie, November) instead.

2023-05-12 9:22:45
2023-08-21 14:57:30
2023-03-04 21:10:15
2023-09-18 8:36:52
2023-06-27 16:48:20
2023-01-09 12:25:37
2023-12-15 19:04:11
2023-07-08 3:14:59
2023-02-23 11:33:42
2023-10-06 22:07:05
2023-04-17 7:55:28
2023-11-30 13:40:18
2023-08-02 18:29:54
2023-05-24 5:16:37
2023-01-28 23:49:03

Use this prompt here, and ChatGPT should give you the correct formula.

I want you to help me create a google sheets formula
In cell B1 I want you to look at A1
the format will be like this: 2023-11-29 17:40:02
this is november 29 2023. 
I want B1 to return just the month "November"

Paste that newly discovered formula into Sheets or Excel and watch the magic happen. Here is a screenshot of what the worksheet looks like for reference.

Just double-check that the results are correct with a few spot checks. Revise your prompt if you’re not getting the output you were looking for. Then, you can save this chat session later by naming it something useful so you can find it later.

4. Check for Malicious Code

Let’s say you’re an amateur web developer like myself and you need some custom code and you’re not a programmer. How do you know the code a random stranger has on the internet is legit?

While it is difficult to know without being a bonified coder, you can at least get a quick sense check by asking ChatGPT.

Here’s the prompt

Please check if this code is malicious in any way.
Here's the code:

5. Personal Copywriter for any Document

If your business or work requires you to write copy regularly, ChatGPT is a wonderful writing assistant. Not only can it check for grammar, help with expanding and contracting paragraphs, but it can help with SEO bits as well.

Here’s a prompt I use mainly to help me create ideas for meta data for my blogs, but it also provides an alternative intro and conclusion.

Here’s the prompt.

I want you to help me write some parts of a blog post.  I will provide the copy from an entire blog post for you to provide the following to me:

Part 1 - Provide a conclusion that summarizes the main findings and their implications of the article.
Part 2 - Using the output from Part 1, create a compelling introduction paragraph that will hook the reader in a few short sentences
Part 3 - Using the output from Part 1, create a meta description that is SEO optimized to entice the reader to read the article.
part 4 - using the output from Part 1, create another introduction but using the AIDA framework to hook in the reader.

From this point on, I can decide if I want to revise my introduction and conclusion and then create my final meta description. Note that this prompt is far from optimized, but it does the job for me. The meta is almost always too long, but you shouldn’t copy and paste output anyway.

Instead, just use the output to avoid writer’s block.

6. Customer Support Assistant

A while back, I wrote a review on Chat Base, an AI assistant built on ChatGPT. What I was able to do with this software was create a custom virtual assistant that could answer the most frequently asked questions for the company that I work for.

After it was implemented, not only did we get more insight into what customers were having challenges with, but we were also able to create better documentation for customers.

One of the most common problems not obvious to our team, was that customers couldn’t figure out how to log into the app.

But don’t worry, even if you don’t have a need for a custom GPT, you can still use the regular ChatGPT to help with customer service by:

• asking it how to revise answers in a more formal (or other tone) way
• help with basic translations if your customer base is global
• provide research on technical topics if they are out of scope for your current job
• helping with data analysis
• and many more other ways!

7. Lead Generation Assistant

Unless you employ sales reps on both halves of the world, at some point, your sales team will need to rest.

But with a custom GPT, this is a problem of the past.

Simply setup your custom GPT (they have a free tier) and feed it all the sales documentation you have. Before you know it, you’ll have a 24/7 sales focused, customer service answering machine.

Be sure to test out the results and revise the chat bot’s answers before going live and turn on lead capture so you can collect those emails.

Wrap Up

I hope I was able to demonstrate some creative and useful ways to incorporate chatGPT (free or paid) into your work flow. By using it, I can easily say it has saved me 2–5 hours a week depending on what I’m working on.

Like with any tool, getting started can be a bit of a challenge, especially with a new tool like this. You may feel the outputs aren’t quite what you expected, but hopefully my prompts (and several more on YouTube) help get you started on the right foot.

Happy Chatting!