While having lunch with a few fellow business owners recently, our conversation turned to the topic on every entrepreneur’s mind—artificial intelligence. It turns out that AI tools have quietly woven themselves into our daily routines, whether we’re brainstorming, researching, or synthesizing data, were also using it in slightly different ways.
Tools like ChatGPT are like Swiss Army Knives for productivity and creativity. It’s no surprise that in the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65% of organizations reported regularly using AI—the technology is here to stay.
That said, leaning too heavily on AI can go awry. If you delegate content creation to ChatGPT, for example, it runs the risk of plagiarizing. The generative AI tool is also a notorious liar. In 2023, one startup found that ChatGPT made things up about 3% of the time. That same year, a Google chatbot’s false claim caused the company’s market value to tumble by around $100 billion.
The key is strategic integration with safeguards in place. If you’re curious about how to integrate AI smartly into your business, here are some friendly tips to get you started while keeping things safe and effective.
Use AI’s strengths—without losing your own
ChatGPT can supercharge your creativity. Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch pitted the large language model (LLM) against humans to determine which group could generate better business ideas. (Spoiler alert: The robots came out victorious.) Commenting on his findings, Terwiesch said that everybody should be using ChatGPT to help them generate ideas—if nothing else, your idea pool will improve. He called it a “no-brainer.” I like to use ChatGPT to get the ball rolling on creative brainstorming. Using simple prompts, you can ask ChatGPT to help you generate ideas and then choose and refine the best ones.
ChatGPT can also summarize dense, lengthy information in seconds. It can break down concepts in as simple terms as you’d like—just begin your prompt with something like, “Pretend you are explaining this to [a 12-year-old, a college kid, etc.].”
Importantly, the best practices with ChatGPT entail using the LLM as a jumping-off point, without delegating your creativity entirely. To me, the idea is to assign ChatGPT the rote or manual parts of your work to make more time and space for wide swaths of impactful, deeply creative work—the work that leads to innovation and breakthroughs.
In sum, use ChatGPT for tasks like summarizing information and generating ideas, not as a replacement for your own critical thinking and expertise.
Always verify information from AI
Fact-checking is a practice that we sometimes take for granted. The New Yorker, known for its historically rigorous fact-checking department, employs around 30 people to verify the facts in every single story. As one former fact-checker explained, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized.”
ChatGPT, however, has no fail-safe in place. That’s why leaders must be skeptical of anything presented as a fact, verify information with sources, and encourage employees to do the same. If ChatGPT generates a summary of something—for example, the latest news on DeepSeek—the summary will include the names of sources hyperlinked to the corresponding web addresses. I recommend checking each one, as ChatGPT has a tendency to link to a source that does not contain the relevant information.
In short, never take information from ChatGPT at face value.
Be clear about how AI should be used
Finally, it’s critical for leaders to be transparent about how employees can use generative AI tools. For starters, this signals to employees that they should leverage LLMs—if they’re not, the company’s competitors and their colleagues will. I regularly encourage Jotform employees to seek out new ways to automate their busywork, including using generative AI tools, to make more time for tasks that feel personally meaningful, motivating, and inspiring.
Failing to communicate corporate policies surrounding AI creates a risk that employees will misuse it—for example, handing over the reins for their creative work, or essentially copying and pasting other people’s work product based on the LLM’s results. Without clear guidance, employees may encounter problems with data security, ethical concerns, and regulatory compliance issues.
There’s no shortage of fear and anxiety surrounding AI, especially regarding its potential to take human jobs. Transparency can help employees understand AI’s role as a productivity and creativity booster, rather than a threat, fostering innovation and meaningful productivity.
By setting clear expectations, leaders create a culture where AI enhances work and advances individuals on their career paths, rather than disrupting them.
