25 AI Hacks High-Growth Founders Swear By to Transform Your Business |
CEOs reveal how they’re using generative AI to solve problems, save time, make more money, and get an edge on their competition.
BY JAKE KLEINMAN, FREELANCE WRITER @JACOBKLEINMAN
Illustration: Inc.
Get a group of business owners together and they are apt to one-up one another. In the recent past, this might have been over how much they sold, how much they raised, or how many employees were on their payroll.
But nowadays, you are just as likely to hear them brag in a new way—about their absolute favorite, most surprising, and most timesaving AI hack.
We talked to more than a dozen founders about AI, and paid subscribers can read on to learn:
Ashley Kirkwood, CEO of the sales-training company Speak Your Way to Cash, uses ChatGPT’s custom GPT feature to deal with customers who haven’t paid their bills. “When you have to have a difficult conversation with a client, we’ll train these GPTs to handle it,” Kirkwood says. She applies the same thinking to most tasks. Rather than train an employee directly, Kirkwood will train a GPT and tell employees to use it. She even gives them names. “Instead of saying, ‘Use the GPT,’ I’m like, ‘Use Ollie, the objection-overcomer.’ ”
Jonathan Meyers, CTO of Agentio, a New York City-based ad platform for creator content, treats Anthropic’s popular chatbot Claude like a member of the team. He’s taught Claude everything there is to know about Agentio’s platform and its employees. “We have an internal saying: Onboard Claude like a co-worker,” Meyers says. The more Claude knows about the inner workings of the company, the more useful it gets, especially when it comes to connecting his human employees with the creators using Agentio.
David Stepania, CEO of tech recruiting platform ThirstySprout, uses Claude to quickly write viral posts on LinkedIn, bringing more attention to his company. “I went on a three-month posting binge,” Stepania says. “I think I had over 7 million views on LinkedIn.” Claude’s work wasn’t perfect—in some cases, it took hours to clean up the text—but the chatbot helped Stepania quickly generate many different ideas to test out on the platform in a matter of minutes, and ThirstySprout picked up new clients as a result. He estimates his AI-assisted LinkedIn binge generated roughly $1 million in new revenue.
Brian De Lowe, co-founder and president of Proper Hospitality, a Santa Monica, California-based luxury hotel group, uses ChatGPT to research his most important guests. Looking into VIPs before they arrive is common practice at luxury hotels, but AI can do the job faster, he says. This involves combing through social-media platforms, as well as summarizing news articles. “We’re trying to understand our guests before they check in so we can create great experiences for them,” says De Lowe.
Once a week, Jesus Repetto, co-founder and CEO of luxury tour operator Titanium Tours, uses ChatGPT to track his company’s financials, projecting cash flow and other key numbers. ChatGPT digs into recent customer relationship and sales data via Excel files that Repetto shares with the AI. He then has it build a table that tracks the company’s estimated bank balances in the coming months. “I usually ask it to find patterns, outliers, and working capital financing needs,” Repetto says. “I’ve been able to start working on our short financing needs way ahead of time.”
Ryan Close, founder and CEO of Bartesian, which sells an automatic cocktail-making machine, recently used ChatGPT to come up with the name and design for a new line of nonalcoholic spirits. He told it: “Here’s what I’m developing. Here’s the taste profile. Help me come up with the names, the branding, everything,” Close says. “So they’re literally developed by ChatGPT.” He’s happy to have saved the $10,000 it would have cost to hire a branding consulting agency to do the same job.
Bo Lais, CEO of property maintenance platform Lula, uses AI voice agents powered by Vapi to answer residents’ calls and troubleshoot issues in their homes. He says the AI has gotten so good that some people don’t even realize they’re not talking to a human, and that most of the time, the AI agent can solve the problem. “We do allow a customer to prompt out and immediately get a human at any time, because we don’t want to frustrate people,” Lais says. “But I would say, like, 75 percent of the time, it’s gone really well and we’ve gotten the results we wanted.”
Sam Moses, founder of Boca Raton, Florida-based Sockrates, a custom sock company, uses an AI tool from Artisan to do cold outreach. He describes his ideal client and the Artisan platform finds a list of new customers and crafts what Moses describes as a “beautiful, personal email” for each of them based on their online behavior. “It’ll be like, ‘Oh, hey, I saw that you went to a trade show last week on your LinkedIn post. You know, we actually sell socks for trade shows,’ ” he explains. He says it has identified thousands of potential new clients.
Most Zoom meetings these days feature at least one lurking note-taking app that’s diligently transcribing the conversation. But the team at Biller Genie, a SaaS company focused on automating accounts receivable, has taken this one step further. The company’s own GPT, which is built on OpenAI’s large language model, is capable of analyzing each meeting and providing feedback afterward—in effect, it helps you read the room. “It can tell how people are engaging with you,” says company president Garima Shah. “Not just how you sounded, but whether the person you were speaking to took that information well.”
As the CEO of Avidon Health, a digital coaching platform, Clark Lagemann has noticed a problem: In meetings with his employees, everyone tends to agree with whatever he says. The solution? ChatGPT. Lagemann likes to assemble a panel of AI characters, including one to play devil’s advocate, and use them to discuss whatever’s on his mind. He’s recently used this method to brainstorm ideas for the best social-media network to use when starting with zero followers and wound up having a conversation with ChatGPT about the benefits of going with TikTok. “It provoked a different strategy,” Lagemann says. “And then it’s my job as the CEO to determine if that’s the strategy I want to pursue.”
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