How Medium-Sized Businesses Can Use AI Today to Save Time and Make Better Decisions — Without Big Budgets. Try these 3 simple prompts.
“How can we streamline day-to-day operations without hiring more staff, in other words how do we improve operations efficiency, operations automation, and operations planning?”
3 simple example prompts to try to answer a leadership question regarding improving operations:
“List five repetitive tasks that a medium-sized farm or agri-business could automate using AI tools.”
“Analyze these notes from our operations team and suggest three bottlenecks we could fix with better scheduling or resource planning.”
“Create a checklist for automating common farm business tasks like invoicing, scheduling, inventory tracking, or order management.”
Steps to follow. If you haven’t used LLMs much before:
In a browser window, enter only one of these and start with the free model: “chatgpt.com”, “gemini.google.com”, “claude.ai”, “copilot.microsoft.com”, “perplexity.ai”. After using one for 4 weeks, trying putting the same prompt into each one. Note that perplexity used to be the only one of the browsers that searched the recent web as well, but I believe that has expanded now to the others.
CAUTION: Anonymize any data you load up, so your organization and personal information are not identifiable.
For context before the prompts above, put in your role, and what you expect as an outcome, and optionally then add “… explain your reasoning”, or “provide your sources”. Review the result carefully because LLMs can fabricate ideas, called “hallucination”.
Later we’ll cover how to adjust the creativity of the responses, call the Temperature, and also the variability in the kinds of words it comes back with in a sentence. And to do those you’ll need a paid version for the tools.
AI represents a fundamental shift and it’s not like previous tech waves. It is here to stay and it is gaining in prominence. You can’t ignore it, but you can shape it. It’s upgrading you, not replacing you. Your biggest risk is falling behind organizations that are learning to use it. You don’t need a huge budget or a tech team to get started. Start with the steps above and take action today using the free versions available.
My goal is to help medium-sized businesses, such as those in Agriculture, adopt and scale AI successfully without hype. If you’re not in the Ag field, swap out the nouns in the prompts above to adapt to your own industry.
I have a deep background in data architectures, operational process optimization, applications development, change management, and project management. I’ve also led business seminars on Strategic Information Systems. AI can work for you and your organization but it is important to be centered and realistic about its implementation and build the right foundation and we’ll cover that in a few posts. For starters AI needs to be treated as another potential critical technology asset, with these drivers:
Understand the ROI like any other asset.
Clean, well structured and organized data is essential.
First, map out your processes, gives you critical guardrails and baselines.
It's hard-core change management - adopting new personal habits.
Manage the change like a project: Cost, Schedule, Scope, and Measures.
Leverage your current execution assets as strategic game-changing AI.
Do something consumable and achievable now. Start the climb.
There is so much information available on prompts right now that it’s become important to be focused on purposeful use and setting appropriate expectations.