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Should Your Business Use ChatGPT? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 379)

April 06, 2023
Person interacting with AI on their phone to illustrate the question, "Should your business use ChatGPT?"

A client recently asked if they should be using ChatGPT for their business? It’s a good question, and given the power and risks these tools present, an important question every business should be asking. It’s also a question without a single, simple answer.


In this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast, we take a ask, "Should your business use ChatGPT?" We look at the upsides and the downsides to see where using ChatGPT might be a good idea. And where it might not.


So should your business use ChatGPT? Maybe… Want to learn why? Here are the show notes for you.


Should Your Business Use ChatGPT? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 379) — Headlines and Show Notes
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Running time: 20m 40s


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Transcript: Should Your Business Use ChatGPT? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 379)

 Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs.


Well, hello again everyone, and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise, your business. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 379 of the Big Show, and I think we got a cool episode for you today. I think we got some fun stuff to talk about. I was recently asked by a client if they should be using ChatGPT for their business.


You know, we’ve been talking a lot about how to balance technology with humanity. We’ve been talking a lot about how, why customer experience is cool and does marketing have a future, and the why we’re in the early innings of AI and marketing and the like. So this is a fair question. When we are in this very early, Is it worth getting out in front and doing something with something like ChatGPT?


And for me, there are two answers to this question. One is, should you be using it internally? And the other is, should you be using it with your customers in terms of should you be doing stuff with it internally? Yes, absolutely. I’m using ChatGPT A ton for basic research, for drafting quick emails for brainstorming ideas.


I’m often surprised by how well it brings perspectives in that I wouldn’t have thought of. I’ve told the story here on the show before about how my dad started working in banks way back in the late forties, 1949. And he entered figures. He was a clerk. He entered figures into a journal, right? Basically a big book where they wrote down notes about loans and who owed what and what the current interest was due and who was, and things like that.


And today, nobody would do that. At minimum, you would use a spreadsheet. And typically you have custom design software that does exactly what you needed to do. And basically, I think of ChatGPT I think of generative AI tools like that as the best spreadsheet you’ve ever seen for your brain in terms of helping you think of things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.


And often things, you know, even when I’m collaborating with my team that no one on the team came up. It is better at answering some kinds of questions than Google is, than traditional search is. So should you be using it for your business in those ways? Absolutely. I am a big, big proponent of testing it out and seeing what you can do with it to make yourself more effective and more efficient in terms of whether or not you should be using it for your customers.


I think we have to answer maybe, but I lean towards not yet. And hang with me here because there’s not a one size fits all answer here. There are good reasons to do this, and I’m going to talk about one example in a moment to give you as full of picture as a can. Now there are lots of companies who are trying to incorporate ChatGPT into their products in various ways.


I will link to some of these in the show notes, but people like Duolingo, slack, snap, Coca-Cola, Instacart, Shopify, ghost, others, you know, there’s definitely a, there. There is definitely the opportunity to do some cool things with ChatGPT, and it might be worth testing with your customers. I’m going to look at one company to kind of illustrate the pros and cons of what’s going on here and why I lean towards.


Maybe not with the huge caveat that the reasons why it’s a good idea for this one company may also be a good idea for you. So the company is Expedia, and Expedia recently announced just in the last few days, that they’re one of the first travel companies to incorporate ChatGPT into their travel tools.


So right out of the gate, I want to give incredible kudos to their team for a very quick rollout. Now it’s in beta, so not everybody has access to it yet. I’ve played with it a little but not a lot. So we know that it’s limited in its reach at the moment. I think it’s an enormous PR win for Expedia. It tells customers that they’re an innovative company and pushing the boundaries of how easy they can make it to book travel.


I think that’s brilliant. Very, very smart and legitimately kudos to Expedia for doing this. I also think there’s a real lesson here in that Expedia is undoubtedly competing for tech talent with all the other big tech firms with Google, with Apple, with Amazon. Even in the face of all the layoffs that we’re seeing, they’re still hiring people to fill particular roles, and AI is certainly going to be one of those roles.


So I think this is a really smart PR move on their part. Showing that they are still a hot commodity in the tech space, and that they innovate and lead the way, in real word, real world AI applications. So if you’re a young AI developer, if you’re just coming outta school or something along those lines, and you’re looking for some place to work, Expedia has made themselves a very attractive option for you, and I think that’s really, really smart.


So this is a PR win. This is a press win. This is a marketing win in a big, big way. I want to be really clear about that. I don’t think Expedia is doing a bad thing here. I also would suggest you remember that when you invent the ship, you invent the ship. We know places where ChatGPT has problems today.


For one thing, it can lie to you. Now, this is one of my favorite stories of what I’ve seen about ChatGPT so far. I really, not trying to knock this, but a friend of mine sent me a couple weeks ago, information that ChatGPT. Shared with my friend about me, right? My friend asked a question of ChatGPT.


My buddy Robert Cole, asked a question of ChatGPT and said, you know what? What do you know about Tim Peter? And it gave. A pretty, pretty good answer, but I’m going to read a couple of pieces of this. It said, Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter and Associates, a digital marketing consulting firm that provides strategic guidance and implementation support to businesses looking to improve their online presence and drive revenue growth.


Sweet. Cool. That’s true. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, Tim has worked with a wide range of clients across industries, including travel, hospitality, finance, retail, and more. Also true, also cool. He is a recognized expert in digital marketing and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, US, and USA Today, and Forbes among others.


Hold on a second. Some of that’s true. I have in fact been featured in Forbes. But I’ve never been featured in the New York Times to my knowledge, and I don’t recall being featured in the US in USA Today. And if it was, it was a very, very long time ago. It then says that prior to founding my company, Tim Peter and Associates, that I held various marketing and leadership roles at companies such as Harda Hanks, modem Media, and McKinsey in Company, and that I hold an MBA from Columbia Business School and a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University.


All of that is a lie. I have no idea where that came from. I was a client of Modem Media a very long time ago, but all the rest, I’ve never worked for McKenzie. I don’t have an M B A from Columbia Business School. I have not attended Georgetown University. Like these aren’t trivial errors. They’re, they’re nice things to be said about me.


They are complete and utter lies. They, this never happened. And then my personal favorite bit apart from that is that it’s talks about awards that I’ve won and I did in fact win one of the awards it list. However, the other two awards, and this really boggled my mind. Not only did I not win the awards it claims that I have, I haven’t been able to find any evidence that the awards, it says I won exist.


These aren’t even awards near as I can tell. Is that something you’re going to want to turn on for your clients, for your customers? Maybe not. I’m not a hundred percent sure. You know the other problem is it may not work so well. I have a friend, DJ Valari. I’m going to link to his post on LinkedIn, in fairness cuz he’s already done the work on this and he talked about trying Expedia’s ChatGPT integration.


And said that it hasn’t been much help, and he asked for comments and so far nobody’s commented and said, no, no, it’s giving really good results. That’s kind of okay. I don’t have a huge problem with that though. I do worry that if it’s lying about things, that may be a problem. And this leads to the last part.


And a reason why I think it’s okay that Expedia has done this, why it might work for Expedia because they may know something. Well, they may know something, you know that’s important to their business that you’d want to think about for yours. Expedia’s customers may not care that much. They may be doing this solely for the PR benefit, right?


In the Focus Wire article that talks about Expedia rolling out ChatGPT integration, they, they’ve stated that Expedia’s existing chat powered 30 million conversations since its launch in 2021, Expedia gets somewhere between 80 to 90 million visits monthly. They launched their original chatbot two years ago.


So 80 million visits times 24 months divided into 30 million conversations means that their existing chatbot use is somewhere around one and a half percent of all the visits to their website or another words. Customers don’t use their chatbot about 98 and a half percent of the time. In other, other words, almost nobody is using.


So that’s kind of a wild thing, right? They may say, you know, there’s not a lot of risk to us here. We’re rolling it out to a limited audience, and we don’t expect it to get a lot of use anyway, so we may as well get the PR benefit, and if that’s what they’re doing. Kudos to them, and if that’s what you want to do, kudos to you.


Now, there is one other reason why this may not be a good idea for Expedia, and I don’t know this for sure, so I’m making some educated guesses here. There was another focus wire article the other day that talked about how Expedia and booking.com spent a combined 12 billion in marketing spend last year.


That’s a huge amount of money. One that got people asking how can any normal business compete with that? And it’s a fair question, but I’d reframe it slightly. Focus wires article notes that Airbnb spends roughly a quarter of what Expedia does. Expedia’s sh share of revenue dedicated to marketing is 52%.


Airbnb’s is about 18% yet, The traffic that Airbnb gets to its site is about the same as Expedia, actually a little higher. If you go by similar web’s numbers. And Airbnb had greater net income than expedient $1.9 billion versus $352 million. So the question I would ask is not how can businesses compete with companies like Expedia?


It’s Why would you want to, and this is the reason why I think Expedia might be making a mistake. There’s some reasons I told you already why this might be a great idea, but they’re spending an enormous amount of money on trying to acquire customers. They’re spending an enormous amount of money on trying to capture new business way more than Airbnb is.


And if they’re using this ChatGPT integration as a way to improve their product or get more PR to attract more customers in a way that they don’t have to spend so much, that’s great. But if it’s a distraction from doing the basic blocking and tackling they need to do to gain customers in an effective, efficient manner.


Then this is really shortsighted. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it isn’t. The reason I’m making a point about this though, is because you should be thinking about if we are trying to integrate ChatGPT, does that help us gain more business? Does it help us grow our customer base?


Does it help us improve the customer experience for our customers? Or are we being distracted by the ooh, shiny and not focusing on giving our customers the experience that they expect and not focusing on attracting customers in ways that we can afford and need to do a better job of today? That’s why I say maybe when I, people ask, you know, should we incorporate ChatGPT?


You should. If it’s going to benefit your customers, you should, if it’s going to benefit your business. But if you’re doing it because it’s the cool new thing and it’s distracting you from the blocking and tackling you should be doing anyway, then that could be a massive, massive mistake and a distraction from what is right for your business.


So should you be using ChatGPT for your business? Again, if you’re using it internally to help you be faster and smarter at how you think and how you research and how you get things out the door? Definitely a hundred percent yes. Should you be using it to connect with your customers? Yes, if it actually helps you do that and improve the experience and lower the cost of acquisition.


But if it distracts you from doing basic blocking and tackling and doing the things you ought to do anyway, then it’s an enormous mistake right now. And instead, you should put your energies and put your efforts towards helping your customers accomplish their goals. And that’s going to be true no matter what.

 Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs.


Well, hello again everyone, and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise, your business. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 379 of the Big Show, and I think we got a cool episode for you today. I think we got some fun stuff to talk about. I was recently asked by a client if they should be using ChatGPT for their business.


You know, we’ve been talking a lot about how to balance technology with humanity. We’ve been talking a lot about how, why customer experience is cool and does marketing have a future, and the why we’re in the early innings of AI and marketing and the like. So this is a fair question. When we are in this very early, Is it worth getting out in front and doing something with something like ChatGPT?


And for me, there are two answers to this question. One is, should you be using it internally? And the other is, should you be using it with your customers in terms of should you be doing stuff with it internally? Yes, absolutely. I’m using ChatGPT A ton for basic research, for drafting quick emails for brainstorming ideas.


I’m often surprised by how well it brings perspectives in that I wouldn’t have thought of. I’ve told the story here on the show before about how my dad started working in banks way back in the late forties, 1949. And he entered figures. He was a clerk. He entered figures into a journal, right? Basically a big book where they wrote down notes about loans and who owed what and what the current interest was due and who was, and things like that.


And today, nobody would do that. At minimum, you would use a spreadsheet. And typically you have custom design software that does exactly what you needed to do. And basically, I think of ChatGPT I think of generative AI tools like that as the best spreadsheet you’ve ever seen for your brain in terms of helping you think of things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.


And often things, you know, even when I’m collaborating with my team that no one on the team came up. It is better at answering some kinds of questions than Google is, than traditional search is. So should you be using it for your business in those ways? Absolutely. I am a big, big proponent of testing it out and seeing what you can do with it to make yourself more effective and more efficient in terms of whether or not you should be using it for your customers.


I think we have to answer maybe, but I lean towards not yet. And hang with me here because there’s not a one size fits all answer here. There are good reasons to do this, and I’m going to talk about one example in a moment to give you as full of picture as a can. Now there are lots of companies who are trying to incorporate ChatGPT into their products in various ways.


I will link to some of these in the show notes, but people like Duolingo, slack, snap, Coca-Cola, Instacart, Shopify, ghost, others, you know, there’s definitely a, there. There is definitely the opportunity to do some cool things with ChatGPT, and it might be worth testing with your customers. I’m going to look at one company to kind of illustrate the pros and cons of what’s going on here and why I lean towards.


Maybe not with the huge caveat that the reasons why it’s a good idea for this one company may also be a good idea for you. So the company is Expedia, and Expedia recently announced just in the last few days, that they’re one of the first travel companies to incorporate ChatGPT into their travel tools.


So right out of the gate, I want to give incredible kudos to their team for a very quick rollout. Now it’s in beta, so not everybody has access to it yet. I’ve played with it a little but not a lot. So we know that it’s limited in its reach at the moment. I think it’s an enormous PR win for Expedia. It tells customers that they’re an innovative company and pushing the boundaries of how easy they can make it to book travel.


I think that’s brilliant. Very, very smart and legitimately kudos to Expedia for doing this. I also think there’s a real lesson here in that Expedia is undoubtedly competing for tech talent with all the other big tech firms with Google, with Apple, with Amazon. Even in the face of all the layoffs that we’re seeing, they’re still hiring people to fill particular roles, and AI is certainly going to be one of those roles.


So I think this is a really smart PR move on their part. Showing that they are still a hot commodity in the tech space, and that they innovate and lead the way, in real word, real world AI applications. So if you’re a young AI developer, if you’re just coming outta school or something along those lines, and you’re looking for some place to work, Expedia has made themselves a very attractive option for you, and I think that’s really, really smart.


So this is a PR win. This is a press win. This is a marketing win in a big, big way. I want to be really clear about that. I don’t think Expedia is doing a bad thing here. I also would suggest you remember that when you invent the ship, you invent the ship. We know places where ChatGPT has problems today.


For one thing, it can lie to you. Now, this is one of my favorite stories of what I’ve seen about ChatGPT so far. I really, not trying to knock this, but a friend of mine sent me a couple weeks ago, information that ChatGPT. Shared with my friend about me, right? My friend asked a question of ChatGPT.


My buddy Robert Cole, asked a question of ChatGPT and said, you know what? What do you know about Tim Peter? And it gave. A pretty, pretty good answer, but I’m going to read a couple of pieces of this. It said, Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter and Associates, a digital marketing consulting firm that provides strategic guidance and implementation support to businesses looking to improve their online presence and drive revenue growth.


Sweet. Cool. That’s true. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, Tim has worked with a wide range of clients across industries, including travel, hospitality, finance, retail, and more. Also true, also cool. He is a recognized expert in digital marketing and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, US, and USA Today, and Forbes among others.


Hold on a second. Some of that’s true. I have in fact been featured in Forbes. But I’ve never been featured in the New York Times to my knowledge, and I don’t recall being featured in the US in USA Today. And if it was, it was a very, very long time ago. It then says that prior to founding my company, Tim Peter and Associates, that I held various marketing and leadership roles at companies such as Harda Hanks, modem Media, and McKinsey in Company, and that I hold an MBA from Columbia Business School and a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University.


All of that is a lie. I have no idea where that came from. I was a client of Modem Media a very long time ago, but all the rest, I’ve never worked for McKenzie. I don’t have an M B A from Columbia Business School. I have not attended Georgetown University. Like these aren’t trivial errors. They’re, they’re nice things to be said about me.


They are complete and utter lies. They, this never happened. And then my personal favorite bit apart from that is that it’s talks about awards that I’ve won and I did in fact win one of the awards it list. However, the other two awards, and this really boggled my mind. Not only did I not win the awards it claims that I have, I haven’t been able to find any evidence that the awards, it says I won exist.


These aren’t even awards near as I can tell. Is that something you’re going to want to turn on for your clients, for your customers? Maybe not. I’m not a hundred percent sure. You know the other problem is it may not work so well. I have a friend, DJ Valari. I’m going to link to his post on LinkedIn, in fairness cuz he’s already done the work on this and he talked about trying Expedia’s ChatGPT integration.


And said that it hasn’t been much help, and he asked for comments and so far nobody’s commented and said, no, no, it’s giving really good results. That’s kind of okay. I don’t have a huge problem with that though. I do worry that if it’s lying about things, that may be a problem. And this leads to the last part.


And a reason why I think it’s okay that Expedia has done this, why it might work for Expedia because they may know something. Well, they may know something, you know that’s important to their business that you’d want to think about for yours. Expedia’s customers may not care that much. They may be doing this solely for the PR benefit, right?


In the Focus Wire article that talks about Expedia rolling out ChatGPT integration, they, they’ve stated that Expedia’s existing chat powered 30 million conversations since its launch in 2021, Expedia gets somewhere between 80 to 90 million visits monthly. They launched their original chatbot two years ago.


So 80 million visits times 24 months divided into 30 million conversations means that their existing chatbot use is somewhere around one and a half percent of all the visits to their website or another words. Customers don’t use their chatbot about 98 and a half percent of the time. In other, other words, almost nobody is using.


So that’s kind of a wild thing, right? They may say, you know, there’s not a lot of risk to us here. We’re rolling it out to a limited audience, and we don’t expect it to get a lot of use anyway, so we may as well get the PR benefit, and if that’s what they’re doing. Kudos to them, and if that’s what you want to do, kudos to you.


Now, there is one other reason why this may not be a good idea for Expedia, and I don’t know this for sure, so I’m making some educated guesses here. There was another focus wire article the other day that talked about how Expedia and booking.com spent a combined 12 billion in marketing spend last year.


That’s a huge amount of money. One that got people asking how can any normal business compete with that? And it’s a fair question, but I’d reframe it slightly. Focus wires article notes that Airbnb spends roughly a quarter of what Expedia does. Expedia’s sh share of revenue dedicated to marketing is 52%.


Airbnb’s is about 18% yet, The traffic that Airbnb gets to its site is about the same as Expedia, actually a little higher. If you go by similar web’s numbers. And Airbnb had greater net income than expedient $1.9 billion versus $352 million. So the question I would ask is not how can businesses compete with companies like Expedia?


It’s Why would you want to, and this is the reason why I think Expedia might be making a mistake. There’s some reasons I told you already why this might be a great idea, but they’re spending an enormous amount of money on trying to acquire customers. They’re spending an enormous amount of money on trying to capture new business way more than Airbnb is.


And if they’re using this ChatGPT integration as a way to improve their product or get more PR to attract more customers in a way that they don’t have to spend so much, that’s great. But if it’s a distraction from doing the basic blocking and tackling they need to do to gain customers in an effective, efficient manner.


Then this is really shortsighted. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it isn’t. The reason I’m making a point about this though, is because you should be thinking about if we are trying to integrate ChatGPT, does that help us gain more business? Does it help us grow our customer base?


Does it help us improve the customer experience for our customers? Or are we being distracted by the ooh, shiny and not focusing on giving our customers the experience that they expect and not focusing on attracting customers in ways that we can afford and need to do a better job of today? That’s why I say maybe when I, people ask, you know, should we incorporate ChatGPT?


You should. If it’s going to benefit your customers, you should, if it’s going to benefit your business. But if you’re doing it because it’s the cool new thing and it’s distracting you from the blocking and tackling you should be doing anyway, then that could be a massive, massive mistake and a distraction from what is right for your business.


So should you be using ChatGPT for your business? Again, if you’re using it internally to help you be faster and smarter at how you think and how you research and how you get things out the door? Definitely a hundred percent yes. Should you be using it to connect with your customers? Yes, if it actually helps you do that and improve the experience and lower the cost of acquisition.


But if it distracts you from doing basic blocking and tackling and doing the things you ought to do anyway, then it’s an enormous mistake right now. And instead, you should put your energies and put your efforts towards helping your customers accomplish their goals. And that’s going to be true no matter what.


New technology comes down the path, whether ChatGPT, other generative AI tools or whatever else we see in the future doing anything else is the exact opposite of using artificial intelligence intelligently.


Show Closing and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for this episode as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 379.


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So thank you very much. I really appreciate you helping make Thinks Out Loud, a better place for all of us involved. So I really, really do want to say thank you again.


Thinks Out Loud on Social Media

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/TimPeterAssociates. You can find me on Twitter using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. and as always, you can email at podcast@timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast@timpeter.com.


Show Outro

Finally, I know I say this every week, but I very much appreciate you listening. I would not do this show without you. It means so much to me that we can have a conversation and build this community together.


It means the world to me that you listen. It means the world to me that you comment. It means the world to me that you reach out to me on social. And I just love that we get to keep the dialogue going. So please, let’s keep the dialogue going. Go ahead, keep your emails coming. Keep pinging me on LinkedIn. Keep pinging me on Twitter. I love hearing from you. I love getting to chat with you about all of this each week.


With all that said, I hope you have an amazing rest of the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care everybody.


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