Briana Pace | Southern Indiana Business Report
The Indiana Small Business Development Center ecosystem navigator is on a mission to teach entrepreneurs how to maximize their efficiency by using AI. He’s teaching them the “right way” to use it.
Grant Sherfick has offered multiple AI for small business workshops across south-central Indiana. The free classes, open to the public, are meant to familiarize people with large language model (LLM) AIs and show them how it can solve problems they are facing.
“My approach was to demystify it,” Sherfick said, “and to try to make it more approachable.”
He knows that many small business owners are apprehensive to start using AI. Privacy is typically their biggest concern; it was for Cleaning Consultants Inc. owner and attendee of one of Sherfick’s workshops, Misty Eilert. In Sherfick’s class, she learned how to use AI and still maintain privacy.
“I would never put financial information in it,” she said. “Anything that I search is something that I don’t mind sharing anyway.”
If you pay for premium services, usually you can opt out of information sharing, but if you use a free version, Sherfick suggests not disclosing too much. Keep prompts general. Most LLMs say they will keep your information private, but Sherfick still encourages people to be conscious of what they share.
In the workshops, he tailors his presentation to attendees’ specific needs, aiming for direct interaction. He asks people in the class what the biggest issue their business is facing at the moment. Usually, they say it’s marketing or general operations.
“A lot of people just don’t have the expertise in marketing,” Sherfick said. “They feel like it’s difficult for them to write content and to come up with something unique all the time.”
Sherfick shows how to prompt AI to act as a marketing manager or content creator and to create campaigns and write ad copy. For issues with general operations, he demonstrates ways to have AI come up with standard operating procedures specific to their business and write job descriptions.
Eilert uses AI for everything to do with her business. She is trying to find more clients and has employees that want more hours, so she used ChatGPT to tell her how to make that happen. She also used it to make a brochure recently. In the prompt, she input the information she wanted included and how she wanted it laid out.
“It gave me a PNG of the actual brochure,” Eilert said. “So, I mean it saved me hours of time.”
Another local small business owner, Abby Rees, uses ChatGPT daily. Her business, Keepsake Journey, is a personalized gift store that offers engravings and flower preservation. Rees mainly uses AI to write her social media captions. She starts with an idea of what she wants to say, types all the information into ChatGPT that she wants included in, then explains how she wants it to sound.
“I just kind of put it in there and say, ‘Hey, rewrite this and make it short, simple in my brand voice, and easily readable,’” Rees said.
While AI can improve a small business’s productivity, Sherfick stresses that it cannot solve all their problems. He explains it is not a search engine, that these LLMs are designed to have a conversation — one that makes you happy.
“You have to remember that,” Sherick said, “and that there is bias built into it.”
As AI grows, so do concerns about it taking jobs from people. Sherfick does not foresee that being an issue with small businesses, though. According to him, 50% of Indiana’s, 600,000 small businesses are just one person and 45% have less than ten employees. There is no job for AI to take; they already can’t afford to hire the help they need. Sherfick thinks AI will more likely take jobs in medium and large-sized businesses.
“I think it’s overhyped,” he said. “I think it’s a fearmongering, overhype that it’s going to take jobs from small businesses.”
Executive director of the Jasper Chamber of Commerce, Nancy Eckerle, realized the impact AI could have on entrepreneurs in the area and contacted Sherfick to host an upcoming workshop, originally scheduled for May 15, but now being rescheduled. When a new date is decided, it will be listed under the events tab on the Jasper Chamber of Commerce website. Sherfick presented a different class at Eckerle’s request in the past; it was focused on ChatGPT.
“That one, the room was packed,” Eckerle said.
Eilert and Rees both attended that workshop. Eilert used ChatGPT beforehand, but still went because she wanted to make sure she was staying up to date on how to use it.
Rees also already was using ChatGPT too, but she felt like she wasn’t getting the results she wanted. She hoped to learn some tips and tricks from Sherfick. Her main takeaway was to, instead of asking the program to try again, respond with thumbs down if she didn’t like the answer.
“It helps the system understand what direction I want it to go in,” Rees said.
Eilert and Rees both encourage fellow small business owners to use AI. They feel it makes their establishments more valuable by helping them make difficult decisions and saving their time.
“AI is the future,” Eilert said. “Whether you are for or against it, you better embrace it.”