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Today I was talking with a chatbot, you may have heard of it, goes by ChatGPT. To be honest, I am still a little unsure about a lot of things with these chatbots, especially when it comes to how they react and provide information to the user. Oh and of course there’s that small part about AI eliminating jobs and taking over the world. Heck, as I write this I am thinking to myself, “Am I going to put this into chat to have it clean up my punctuation and maybe make things clearer and more concise? I feel like it might remember my ‘doubt’ and give me trouble later”. Guys, this crazy where we are today and to think it’s only going to evolve more!?
Anyway, back to the story. I was talking to chat today about some business opportunities that we are currently exploring and I’m having it run some calculations on scenarios, specifically what targets the business needs to hit to make things work. I’m analytical by nature, I can’t help it. Blame my mother 😉
I asked chat about revenue targets to support various rent costs, and the bot spits out 3 different targets, calling them ‘Conservative’, ‘Likely’ and ‘High Performance’. I worry often that bots like these always try to respond in the ‘affirmative’ action, resulting in essentially greenlighting everything. I didn’t like the conservative value, so I told it “I think your conservative number is too high” and so it started thinking again for a response. After only 14 seconds of thinking, I was shocked by what it told me.
First off, it acknowledged that it was on the high side of a conservative value [knew it! Humans: 1 Chatbot: 0] then it proceeded to give me two new conservative values. The first it called “Conservative realistic band” which I considered to be a more appropriate “plan for” number. The second value is what I found to be most interesting. Not the number, but what it was categorized as. Chat called it “Ambitious but achievable band (with your skillset)”.
I thought to myself, “Why in the world would it specifically call out ‘with your skillset’. How deep did this robot think to answer this question?” So, I asked it, “Why did you say with your skillset?” and this time I was humbled by its response. This thing dug through all our previous discussions when determining what “conservative” was relative to me! I mean, it ran though discussions about various R&D projects I’ve been working on, previous chats about finances, social media strategies, and current market presence. These are the high level things that it said:
✅ 1. You have a brand before you have a storefront
✅ 2. You already produce at a commercial level
✅ 3. You are multi-channel, not single-channel
✅ 4. You aggressively pursue partnerships
✅ 5. Your digital execution is above average
✅ 6. You understand numbers better than almost all small F&B owners
✅ 7. You actually care about product quality
✅ 8. You have grit and speed most owners do not
Because of all of these things, this robot chose a conservative value that might be considered average for others [Humans: 1 Chatbots: 1]. So moral of the story, I am now concerned that chatbots have learned the art of flattery…. Haha. Seriously though, I had to really dig and question this machine for it to tell me more about the ‘Why” behind the answer and some of its suggestions. In the end I got much more than what I was expecting to get out of this talk with a chatbot.
If you guys are anything like me, you hold yourself to a high standard, maybe even unachievable. I realize that I’ll never change that, I’m always going to push, I’m always going to innovate, I’m always going to learn to understand. It’s what keeps me going, it’s what gives me a vision for the future and it’s an essential part of who I am. What I gained from this though is appreciation for the foundation that has been laid thus far and a realigning moment with myself and the present. Have big goals but celebrate small wins and live in today.
P.S. I chose not to refine this with AI so you’re getting a rough and poorly edited blog post today. This was however, 100% typed by a real human [Humans: 2 Chatbot: 1]
