How ChatGPT is helping MSMEs automate tasks for greater efficiency

Micro, small and medium enterprises or MSMEs form the backbone of the Indian economy contributing to nearly 8% of the country’s GDP, around 45% of the manufacturing output, and approximately 40% of the country’s exports. In recent months, MSMEs have begun embracing the power of new-age AI driven tools like ChatGPT to simplify their everyday communication needs without having to employ specialised personnel and save on costs. 

What is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It is a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence that allows users to have conversations with a chat bot to get answers to questions, compose emails, essays, and write code. Its basic version is absolutely free to use and was made available to the public in November 2022. While the earlier versions of ChatGPT-3 and 3.5 were free to use, Ver. 4 seeks a nominal payment as of now. 

What are MSMEs using ChatGPT for?

While the applications are many, a survey of 1000 companies in the US by resumebuilder.com found that 48% organisations were able to realise a savings of $50,000 or more by using ChatGPT for a variety of tasks. 

66% of companies used it to write code

58% of companies used it for copywriting to create content, whereas

57% used it for better customer support and, 

52% of firms used it to generate meeting minutes and summaries. 

Here are some advantages or benefits of using ChatGPT across different departments within your MSME:

1. ChatGPT can help you go-to-market faster by helping compose proposals, write product descriptions and respond to RFPs: Responding to Request for Proposals or RFPs, composing business plans, preparing project reports, case studies and composing emails is a specialised skill that needs inputs from different departments to be collated by a content writer, but with ChatGPT easing content creation MSMEs can cut down on the time taken to respond to queries from prospective clients and turn around business proposals faster, helping grow opportunities. ChatGPT can also function as a very effective research tool on any subject of your choice, helping employees find statistics, past publications, and access facts by conversing in simple English. 

2. ChatGPT can also be used as a content marketing aid to create a consistent tone and language to unite all communication across channels: Nowadays MSMEs have to create a variety of collateral to keep up with bigger players. Be it blog posts, white papers, infographics, case studies, or memes, ChatGPT can ease the lives of marketing executives by providing ready made content in response to specific content buckets, or platforms. For example ChatGPT can be promoted to generate content for LinkedIn posts, or Instagram captions. Moreover, it can be asked to suggest content hooks based on data on website traffic, and conversion rates to further evolve content basis performance marketing insights. 

3. Use ChatGPT to write job descriptions, automate job application responses and more: Most MSMEs do not have the luxury to have a large HR department to manage hiring needs. In this context, ChatGPT can prove to be a boon for writing job descriptions, drafting interview requests, and responding to applicant queries with standard text. 

4. ChatGPT can help answer employee and customer queries and improve customer support functions: MSMEs today have to cater to customers across multiple platforms and be available to answer queries or troubleshoot issues 24/7. With a small staff size this can pose a challenge to customer-service representatives. This is where ChatGPT can prove to be a game changer by helping turn leads into customers and pick up conversations where they have been left off, because of its ability to remember past user comments and provide accurate and useful follow-up information. ChatGPT can be integrated within a service desk to provide employees with 24/7 support and to answer frequently asked questions. By automating these repetitive processes, organisations can save time and resources, allowing them to focus on the other important areas of their businesses.

5. ChatGPT can be used to access information about various subjects even in regional Indian languages, using voice technology in the near future: Recent news articles report that MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) is planning to integrate ChatGPT on WhatsApp to help farmers in India learn more about various government schemes. What's more, Bhashini is currently developing a WhatsApp chatbot using ChatGPT’s data models so users can send questions via voice notes and get responses via audio messages in 12 different regional languages including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Assamese, and Odia and more. This revolutionary government platform aims to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources available in the public domain to be used by -- Indian MSMEs, startups and individual innovators.

As far as this technology is concerned, it is still early days yet. But the future of automation certainly seems bright for MSMEs who can rely on AI-Driven engines to simplify mundane tasks, and generate more value from their business using tools like ChatGPT 4.

The article has been written by Punit Thakkar - CEO and MD, Shivaam