The power of ChatGPT

AI is not a new concept. It’s been talked about since around 1950 when Alan Turing coined the “Turing Test” to determine whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. Enter ChatGPT. This Artificial Intelligence chatbot fulfills Turing’s wildest dreams and passes his test with flying colors. Over the past couple years, I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking on what transformations can happen over the next five to 10 years for our industry. But, ladies and gentlemen, the future is now and the transformation is happening before our eyes.

I’d like to introduce you to ChatGPT, what it is and what it isn’t. I’ll provide you with some examples on how to use it. And, I’ll close with some thoughts on how it might transform our industry.

What is ChatGPT?

Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a cutting-edge language model that generates human-like text based on the input it receives. It stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” It’s ‘trained’ on a vast dataset of text from the internet, which enables it to ‘generate’ responses that mimic human communication. By understanding the context of a given prompt, it can create relevant and coherent content that matches the desired tone and style.

Unlocking ChatGPT's potential

ChatGPT's versatility makes it an asset for garden center owners. Here are some of the ways it can help streamline your business:

1. Customer support: ChatGPT can be a valuable asset for answering customer inquiries via email or live chat, freeing up your team's time to focus on more pressing tasks.
2. Blog posts: Struggling to find the time to write engaging content for your garden center's blog? ChatGPT can create informative and relevant articles on various topics, from gardening tips to product spotlights.
3. Marketing emails: With ChatGPT, you can craft compelling marketing emails that effectively communicate your latest promotions and offers, helping you drive sales and customer engagement.
4. Product descriptions: Writing detailed product descriptions for your e-commerce site can be time-consuming. ChatGPT can generate descriptions for your inventory, ensuring that customers have all the information they need to make informed decisions.
5. Website content for SEO: To attract more visitors to your garden center's website, you need to optimize your content for search engines. ChatGPT can help you create SEO-friendly content that ranks higher in search results, driving more organic traffic to your site.
6. Social media posts: Keeping your garden center's social media presence fresh and engaging can be a challenge. ChatGPT can help you create captivating posts that resonate with your audience and encourage interaction.

My dad even used it to generate a form renewal letter for his commercial tenants. The possibilities are as endless as your imagination.

To get started, go to chat.openai.com to create an account. It’s free to get started.

At this point in my article, I’ll point out what you might suspect. This article was written largely by ChatGPT. I fed it an outline with some details and concepts along with an explanation of my audience and personal perspective. It produced a fully written article. At that point, I rephrased some things in my own words, added some anecdotes and otherwise edited the article, completing it in less than half the time it otherwise would’ve taken!

Proceed with caution: The importance of human oversight

While ChatGPT is undeniably powerful, it’s essential to remember that it’s not infallible. As a machine learning model, its responses may occasionally be inaccurate or irrelevant. It's crucial to maintain human oversight when using AI-generated content to ensure that it aligns with your garden center's voice, but also represents factual information about topics like gardening and plant care. While about 9/10 of the responses are dead on, you do find gaps in its capabilities. As you use it more, you’ll start to understand where those gaps are and steer clear.

Also warranting caution is the notion that ChatGPT seemingly levels the playing field for gardening expertise that most of our companies boast as a competitive advantage. Customers will be confident sourcing answers themselves now more than ever.

Our role should be the voice of reason. Cultivating an ability to work with AI to coax the correct and personally relevant information for each customer may evolve as our new competitive advantage. Another angle would be to use our expertise to filter and curate the answers to the customers’ questions they didn’t know they had.

To get the most out of ChatGPT, treat it as a helpful assistant that can complement your existing processes. By working collaboratively with the AI, you can save time and effort while maintaining the high-quality content and expertise that your customers expect.

The future of AI

The above examples mostly represent situations where you are copy/pasting prompt responses from ChatGPT to the end destination. However, look out for examples of cloud-based software that are integrating ChatGPT into its user interface.

For example, Shopify can generate product descriptions for you directly within the text editor of the product. You may have also seen some AI integrated into the Microsoft Office suite of tools, which is due to their partnership with OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT.

To keep pace with the rate of change that AI will impose on businesses, consider investing in innovative cloud-based software that are building partnerships with AI companies, or building AI models themselves. For those a bit more hands on and ahead of the curve, ChatGPT just launched plug-ins. Long story short, ChatGPT can now “do things” vs. just “say things.”

The possibilities for AI-powered automation are virtually limitless, and as technology continues to advance, how plants are purchased and how gardens are gardened will change before our eyes. It’s time to jump on the bandwagon or it may leave without you.