I’m used to seeing articles about AI being used for either highly scientific uses or for generating semi-entertaining nonsense. For a personal business involving managing appointments, documenting meetings, tracking payments etc, can AI help with any of that? Other things include undertaking CPD training, occasional advertising as well as maintaining a website from time-to-time.
The people I know who don’t think AI has any use for them belong in this category and work in the area of mental health, yoga teaching / training, nursing and massage therapy.
As others have noted, LLMs are prone to error and need review. They can be very helpful in taking large amounts of information and making it more concise.
To your question about how AI can generally be of use, AI is good at taking large amounts of information we humans normally would have issue consuming and reacting to and giving us reactions based on the algorithm we gave it related to the info. I’ll give you an example from my life that may make sense to you as a fellow small business owner.
I used to work for a large company that had a travel agent. I used to travel every week and was told to use the agency to book my flights. The corp has specific requirements about 2nd best cost and non stop vs 1 stop. I could end up with a crappy seat and extra flight stops and had no control officially. Back then I would use Expedia to stitch together what flights I wanted and then casually provide constraints to the agency so that I would get exactly the carrier, non stop flights and decent seats… But it required time to figure these things out. I was the AI taking all of the info thay mattered to me and crafted my result based on what I wanted. I would game the agency/corp’s constraints to get the one flight I wanted.
AI could be useful for managing your schedule (personal and work) to book sessions for clients. One could argue that how hard is it to just let clients book into your schedule, but consider Motion app. Motion can watch how you book clients, when you take lunch, when you normally start or end days, and help move appointments around or create availability on the fly. You could tell an AI app like motion that you need prep and clean up time, you take longer lunches two days a week, etc…
As with all AI you can do what it does. What’s interesting is AI can learn your processes and start to anticipate like a good Admin executive… But it takes training and maintenance. That’s the expensive part. Maybe time, maybe money, maybe both.
To make a long post longer, AI could help with marketing. It’s like the old school mail inserts, but with extra smarts. I’m sure there are AI marketing tools that take certain data and constraints and then shoot out various emails, calls, texts and posts to the demos you need at a frequency and amplitude that the tool thinks matches your business model. I’m speculating at this point tho.