We connected GPT-5 to our company Drive and Google Mail to automate part of the hiring process. It reviews the assessment tests stored on our drive, ranks it against the criteria we set, marks the best applicants to review, and once I approve the short-list of candidates, GPT emails them with our calendar times for their first interview. This single automation took 15 minutes to set-up and has saved me 20hrs during our last month's hiring round. Advice to founders is to start noticing what mundane tasks you wish you could delegate to someone else, and try to automate that through GPT. You'll be surprised at just how much you can automate.
GPT-5 has been a valuable addition to my entrepreneurial journey. In fact, it is my daily partner in decision-making, brainstorming, testing, refining ideas, and many more tasks. Currently, I have been automating my workflow through GPT-5 and it has reduced my workload upto a great extent. Instead of going through lengthy sales or financial reports, GPT-5 gives me clear summaries with key insights in minutes. It also helps me evaluate risks, compare scenarios, and suggest strategies to make business decisions accordingly. Our teams in the offices use GPT-5 too. Now our marketing team can plan campaigns in half the time without wasting hours on research. Our support team also uses it to analyze tickets and suggest human-like responses. Eventually, GPT-5 has been a helpful tool for us from all sides. Honestly, my advice for founders who are thinking of exploring AI integration: use it for heavy-lifting and repetitive tasks like gathering, analyzing, or presenting data so your team has more time for creative and strategic work. Also include human input and experience along with it for decision-making for powerful results.
For a CXO, one of the biggest challenges is indecision, which often happens because of not having enough clarity on areas you're less familiar with. It's easy to recognize something as important, but then delay acting on it because you don't have the right context or understanding. One way I've been using GPT-5 to boost my productivity is by assigning it a specific persona and asking for advice through that lens. I don't take the response at face value, but it helps me quickly surface the key assumptions and hypotheses. From there, I can validate those insights with another LLM, a trusted advisor, or another source. This technique dramatically shortens the cycle, from time to information, to time to insight, to time to decision, and finally to time to execution. My advice to founders exploring AI: don't think of it as replacing your judgment, think of it as accelerating your clarity. Use it to frame hypothesis faster, so you spend your time making decisions, not hunting for context.
I use GPT-5 as a simulation tool before making any high-stakes pitch—whether that is to an investor, a prospective client, a strategic partner, or for a product or service agreement. Instead of asking it to improve my pitch directly, I tell it to take on the role of the decision maker I am targeting and to prioritize that person's goals and interests. I provide the company or organization name and instruct GPT-5 to research everything it can about them, including who they work with, past approvals, partnerships, and stated priorities. Then I paste or attach my pitch and ask for a one-word answer on whether they would accept it if they were that person, followed by why or why not. If the answer is no, I ask what I should change and why, then factor the advice into what is realistic for us and aligned with our mission. This ensures I strengthen the offer without compromising our values or overpromising. Other entrepreneurs can try this with three prompts: 1. "Act as [role or title of the decision maker] at [company name]. Research their interests, past approvals, partnerships, and priorities. Focus on their best interests. Here is their background and criteria: [details]." 2. "Here is my pitch: [paste or attach PDF]. Would you accept this deal in one word and then explain why or why not?" 3. "What should I change to make this a yes and why?" By the time you send the real proposal or walk into the meeting, you will have already addressed dozens of simulated objections, making your pitch more compelling, relevant, and likely to win.
GPT5 is the perfect sounding board for ideas, research and inspiration. Share your ideas with AI, but most importantly, ask it to rebute your opinions. The role of the devil's advocate will allow you to step outside of your mental box and get a fresh perspective. This isn't always innate; especially with how AI can often lead you directly towards confirmation bias. Treat AI as a smart coworker: believe in yourself and ideas first, but don't be afraid of asking somebody else too.
Hi there, I'm Stephen Greet, the CEO and Co-founder of BeamJobs. We've helped over 3 million job seekers build stronger resumes, and as an entrepreneur, I use GPT-5 to create custom GPTs. Creating custom GPTs has enabled me to use specific tools that are relevant to a set of tasks, such as marketing or even evaluating blogs by only feeding a URL. Since the instructions are permanent and pre-set, even if ChatGPT slows down in response due to chat volume, I only need to start a new conversation and send the URL again, without giving it long instructions again. This switch has helped not only me, but my entire team to save time and focus on other growth strategies. I hope these insights add value to your piece. Best regards, Stephen Greet CEO and Co-founder @BeamJobs __________________ BeamJobs: https://www.beamjobs.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-greet/
Customize your ChatGPT to understand your style. Create GPTs and projects that are trained properly with good data and context. Have your own CFO, CPA, and Marketing consultants trained for your business. Make sure that memory is up to date and have summary documents set up for context creation every time you open new chats where this is relevant. ChatGPT is amazing for brainstorming and going into depth on a series of questions. Never use it just for search or superficial questions, that's too energy-consuming and makes no sense. Set up the context for your agent to dig more and ask you smart questions with the end goal clearly defined. The saying that you can have an entire company of experts with ChatGPT is pretty much accurate for many companies now, and every leader should learn the right usage and train their employees on it without using creative and critical thinking.
Julia here, owner of Flowers & Flowers, Inc., a Toronto-based flower shop. Running both a physical store and an online shop means my days are a mix of orders, events, and a constant stream of messages from all directions. GPT-5 has turned into a bit of a lifeline for me. I use GPT-5 to wrangle all the messy scheduling details. Customer notes come in through texts, emails, and even scribbles from people who stop by the shop. Instead of me piecing it together, I just dump it all into GPT-5 and ask it to lay out a clean calendar. It saves me from that endless "wait, did I put that in already?" loop. I also lean on GPT-5 for outreach. Whether it's hotels, event organizers, or local companies, finding the right person to talk to used to eat up hours. Now I'll have GPT-5 help me spot who to reach out to AND find how I can reach them. If you're just getting into AI, don't overcomplicate it. Pick one task that makes you groan every time, and see if GPT-5 can shave it down. That's when you'll really feel the difference.
Drew Mansur, Co-Founder of of Verandah (TileCloud and Yabby's umbrella brand). I've been exploring GPT-5 for what it offers to entrepreneurs. While it has better speed and stability than previous models I've been loving how much more you can get out of it when you treat it as a collaborator rather than a task runner.\n\nA mistake I see other professionals is to think of AI as something to simply delegate menial tasks to. Just asking it to \"analyse this data\" or \"write this plan\" is a waste of its potential: you get the real value when you reframe the interaction. Instead of a single task-doing prompt, ask, \"How could I analyze this sales data to reveal trends that highlight where my funnel needs improvement?\". It's humbling how much better the results and insights are when you bat around a couple ideas and angles first rather than try to kill the task in one shot.\n\nA game-changing technique I've been recommended by my network is ending a prompt with: \"ask me 5 questions (one at a time) to get a better understanding of what I require.\" There's usually one thing that it will ask you, that you may not have thought about. So not only are you prompting it, but it's prompting you. It's been a game changer.\n\nFor entrepreneurs, my takeaway is simple: GPT-5 isn't about shortcuts, it's about amplifying your thinking and unlocking entirely new ways of working.
We asked Chat GPT-5 if it had our resources and experience how would it make £1000000. It laid out a social media marketing strategy and brand awareness platform that we are engaging with today. This boosted or decision making as a clear plan was laid out for social media engagement. Founders are often juggling all the jobs involved in a new business and this streamlined our marketing decisions. We used AI to build a shopify website, it laid out a step by step beginner guide to get our online retail space functioning and engaging. As a new founder I would lean into AI for specific business processes that can seem daunting. Ask the big questions and get the AI to break it down into step by step workable processes and remove the anxiety surrounding the unknown.
We treat LLMs like tireless, sharp interns. At INK, we used generative AI to handle the groundwork: things like keyword research, clustering, and content outlines. That freed our writers to focus on what truly connects with our clients: voice, empathy, and originality. It worked. We grew from zero to 1.2 million organic visitors in just 16 weeks, without bloating the team or burning anyone out. On the backend, SmythOS keeps that balance in check. Our runtime is lightweight—50 MB—but designed with intention. It's portable, open-source, and comes with built-in security, audit logs, and policy enforcement. We call the agents that run on it "Goldilocks agents": autonomous enough to add value, but governed enough to stay safe. If you're a founder diving into AI, don't try to automate everything at once. Start small. Pick one bottleneck like summarizing meetings or routing support tickets, and give it to an agent. Keep humans involved, instrument everything, and scale only once you've earned trust.
As an entrepreneur, one of the best applications of GPT-5 (a.k.a "AI") is for decision-support workflows. Rather than spending hours synthesizing market research, customer voice-of-the-customer, or competitive analysis, I can structure the inputs to GPT-5 and get delivered to me a condensed synthesis, comparison of scenarios, and even a draft action plan I can edit. For instance, during our analysis of customer sentiment around new product lines, I was able to input a few different sources of reviews and surveys and have GPT-5 help me quickly create maps of customer sentiment patterns, compressing days of work into just a few hours. The greatest productivity improvement happens when GPT-5 and automation sync up so that research summaries flow seamlessly into KPI dashboards for my team. I would not consider this replacement for my own judgment; rather, it provides me with greater clarity about how to start. For founders of companies who are new to AI, I encourage you to start with something small and specific. Don't try to "AI everything" at once. Pick one repetitive, time-consuming task such as content drafting, customer Q&A, or research synthesis to pilot GPT-5. When you have measurable results, then scale from there. The real efficiency will come from using GPT-5 to augment and complement your daily workflows - not one-off experiments.
Right now, I'm using GPT-5 to help me work more efficiently as an entrepreneur. I use it to create plans, improve presentations, and quickly review customer feedback or survey results to find useful insights. It also helps me come up with marketing ideas, organize content, and make internal documents easier to manage. This has saved me a lot of time switching between different tools, so I can focus on important tasks. One especially useful tool is a custom version of GPT trained to match my business's style and goals, making sure the output is relevant and consistent. If you're a new entrepreneur trying to use AI, my advice is to pick one specific task that takes up a lot of your time. Try using AI to help or do part of that task. Test it out, learn from it, and only expand if it really adds value.
AI tools are great for making a team more efficient, but only if they're used consistently. Instead of using GPT-5 "productivity hacks," we use Google Gemini in a way that's all about creating uniformity. Specifically, we created a custom "Gem" (a custom GPT) to ensure our email language is consistent across the entire company. I've found that even though a team member's email content might be perfect, the tone can be off. One team member might write in a stark, direct style, while another might write more casually. Our Gem takes whatever we write and rephrases it to match our company's specific, professional, and friendly tone, style, and voice. It's a small change. But it's a small change that helps keep every message we send on point and consistent with our brand and values. It's made us more productive in the long run, because we don't need to think about how we craft individual, non-templated emails. So that's my advice to other founders: start small. Don't look for an AI solution to solve your biggest, most complex problem. Instead, find a small, repetitive task and create a solution that helps you standardize that task. From there, you can slowly scale up your AI integrations as you find new, repeatable use cases.
I've been using GPT-5 to draft and refine franchise SOPs, which used to take days of back-and-forth with my team but now gets done in one afternoon with cleaner edits and faster rollout. For founders starting out, I'd suggest using AI on repeatable tasks first--things like onboarding docs or pitch decks--since it frees your brain for the creative and strategic work only you can do.
I use what I call a blank canvas prompt. I let the AI go free on a first draft with no rules, then I step in and shape it. It's not always pretty but it gets the ideas flowing. What used to take me four or five hours is now about ninety minutes. I still edit to make sure it sounds like us, but I'm no longer stuck staring at a blank page and that's a huge relief. For founders starting out with AI, don't expect magic. It won't hand you a ready-to-publish article. Sometimes it gives you nonsense if you're not careful enough. So, stop thinking of AI as a query tool. Think of it as a creative partner. The more context and personality you give it, the better and more unique the output will be.
My advice for fellow founders just beginning to explore AI integration is this: start with bottlenecks you already know are slowing you down. Don't chase flashy use cases. If you can identify one repetitive process (like research synthesis, specific content drafting etc) and use GPT-5 to drastically cut down that time, you'll build trust in the technology and uncover more natural ways to expand its role in your business.
One of the most useful ways I use GPT-5 is in early-stage product messaging, and comms with retailers. I will first put down the main points in bullet form, and then let GPT-5 read them. I can see different ways to phrase something. Simplify some of the more complicated nutrition science. Or make small tweaks to the same copy so that it is appropriate for different audiences (parents need to hear one version of the story, pediatricians and nutritionists another, and of course, buyers need to hear a different one as well). What I would have spent hours rewriting manually, I can now do in a fraction of the time. In a world where you are trying to scale while also staying scrappy, those hours start to add up in a hurry. The key for other founders and early-stage startups is to realize that you should be using AI as a collaborator but not a replacement. You still need to provide the passion, the vision and the values that are unique to you and your company, but AI can help fast-track the more mundane or tedious aspects so that you can focus on the areas where your judgment can't be replaced. In a word, the more intelligent you are about what you can offload, the more energy you will have for the work only you can do.
I utilize GPT-5 as a strategic co-pilot for market research and decision-making in my role as an entrepreneur. I give GPT-5 raw data instead of spending hours reading industry reports or creating content. It rapidly extracts insights, benchmarks for competitors, and even clearly produces investor updates or customer messaging. I save a lot of time and improve my execution concentration at the same time. I would advise entrepreneurs to start small by incorporating GPT-5 into a single repetitive operation, assess the results, and then grow from there rather than attempting to "AI-ify" everything at once. The secret is to view AI as a tool to increase productivity rather than as a substitute for human judgment.
I'm Cody Jensen, and I own an SEM agency called Searchbloom. We treat GPT-5 less like a gadget and more like a sparring partner. It helps us stress-test ideas, sharpen pitches, and see angles we might miss in the rush of running an agency. It's cut hours of tinkering down to minutes and given us back headspace for the bigger moves. My advice to founders is, don't use AI to look busy. But use it to help you concentrate on decisions that move the needle.