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.
One way I use GPT-5 that really helps my business is by having it pretend to be my toughest customers before I launch something new. For example, before I release a product or share a new idea, I ask GPT-5 to act like someone who is skeptical or frustrated. It asks tough questions or points out problems I didn't see. This saves me from being surprised later and lets me fix things before they become real issues. Not only does this make my decisions better, but it also helps me feel more confident about what I'm sharing with the world. Sometimes, I even run whole practice conversations so I'm prepared for anything, and every time I do this, I notice my team feels calmer, too. Knowing we tested our ideas with "fake tough customers" makes everyone trust the process more, which keeps us focused and less nervous when it's time for the real deal. If you're just starting with AI, my advice is to use it for practice rounds before big decisions. Try questioning your own products or ideas, even if it feels weird at first. GPT-5 won't judge you, but it will help you get ready for what real people might say, and that's been a secret weapon for my business growth.
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.
The biggest shift for me has been using GPT-5 to speed up how we prepare for prospect meetings and pitches. At Manifest, we often need to digest a lot of information about a company, its leadership team, and recent market activity before we even start thinking about outreach. Now, instead of spending half a day pulling that together manually, I can feed the information into GPT-5 and get a clear, concise brief in minutes. It highlights potential angles for discussion, suggests ways to align our offer with their priorities, and even flags areas where competitors might already be active. That means we go into meetings much better prepared and with a stronger point of view. I also use it for scenario planning when making business decisions. For example, if we're weighing up a new service line or pricing model, I can run different assumptions through GPT-5 to explore potential outcomes before speaking to my leadership team. It does not make the decision for me, but it accelerates the thinking process so we spend more time discussing solutions rather than gathering data. For founders who are just starting out, I'd say pick one problem you face every week that drains time or energy, and see how AI can reduce that friction. You do not need a grand AI strategy on day one. You just need to build confidence by seeing real value quickly, then expand from there.
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.
Using GPT-5 to simplify onboarding and SOP creation We use GPT-5 to auto-generate visual SOPs for new campaigns. I plug in our exact workflows, client industries, and past campaign insights, and it spits out step-by-step guides with callouts, timelines, tool links, and platform-specific do's and don'ts. No fluff. Just plug-and-play formats that even a new hire can follow on day one. It cut onboarding time in half and killed 80% of repeat questions from junior staff. Before this, every onboarding doc was a Frankenstein doc copied from past Google Docs. Inconsistent tone. Random screenshots. And always outdated. With GPT-5, I regenerate fresh documentation weekly, even adjusting for things like platform changes in Meta Ads Manager or Google's recent AI ad updates. It makes documentation feel less like a chore and more like an asset. Advice for new founders Don't start with automation. Start with clarity. Before plugging AI into your workflows, write down what you do, step by step, like you're teaching a 10-year-old. Then, and only then, feed it into GPT-5. Otherwise, you're automating chaos. AI only makes you more efficient at what you're already doing—so make sure it's the right thing you're doing first.
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.
Using GPT-5 Thinking mini has given us three practical benefits that non-technical founders will care about most: it saves time, produces more testable ideas, and improves the quality and speed of customer-facing content. We reduced weekly reporting and idea generation from about four hours to about one hour, and we now produce three to five testable experiments per week instead of zero to one. How we do it in plain language: each morning we pull basic performance data from Google Analytics 4, Search Console, and our site event logs, and feed a curated summary into GPT-5. The model returns a short executive summary, two to three priority experiments to try, and a suggested social post ready for a one-minute edit. We also use the model to draft Structured Query Language queries for our engineers and to scaffold simple tests, but every output is reviewed by a person before it is acted on. Practical advice for non-technical founders: Start with one repeatable task that costs you time each week, for example weekly performance reporting, public relations outreach, or customer support triage. Automate only the parts that are routine. Collect the data in a single place such as a spreadsheet, run short prompts against that summary, and keep a human in the loop to verify results. Measure the impact. Track time saved and the number of ideas you actually run. If you see clear return on investment, expand the workflow slowly. If you prefer a low-technical route try a no-code connector such as Zapier or Make to pull data into a Google Sheet, then use a hosted GPT-5 product or a vetted AI platform to run the prompts. That approach gets most of the benefit without hiring engineers.
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.
One way I'm using GPT-5 as an entrepreneur is to help me brainstorm and outline content faster—whether it's podcast episode ideas, newsletter drafts, or talking points for speaking engagements. As someone who juggles multiple roles, GPT-5 acts like a creative co-pilot. It helps me organize my thoughts quickly so I can focus more on my message and less on staring at a blank page. For founders just starting to explore AI, my biggest piece of advice is this: use it to enhance your voice, not replace it. Let AI support your workflow, but make sure your values, story, and lived experience stay front and center. That's what builds real connection—and that's what makes your brand unforgettable.
Hi there! I'm Justin Brown, co-creator of The Vessel. We run purpose-driven cohort workshops and grow without a heavy ad stack. The single biggest efficiency win I've had with GPT-5 is using it as a managing editor over our "robot writers." We run a Trello queue of topics with audience, promise, and angle; when I toggle a row to "brief," Make.com fires a Cloud Function that asks GPT-5 to produce a house-style outline, source requirements, and interview prompts. A cheaper model drafts the article, but GPT-5 does two editorial passes: first, it enforces our rubric (voice, structure, claims) and binds every statistic or date to a primary source; second, it runs a red-team pass that tries to break the argument, proposing tiny experiments or counter-examples if the piece is too certain. The system drops a pass/fail note in Slack with three change requests I can accept or reject in Notion. We switched from legacy models because they drifted, hedged, and hallucinated under deadline; GPT-5 is far better at "don't do x" constraints, so our QA is finally predictable. The core instruction I reuse is, "Assume the draft is 15% overconfident. List the five most fragile claims, replace any unsourced stat with a primary citation or a practical example, and cut weasel words. If a claim can't be supported, delete it and add a test readers can run this week." Since moving to this workflow, our draft-to-publish time fell from days to hours, factual corrections per piece dropped by roughly two-thirds, and we've been able to ship two extra long-form articles most weeks without adding headcount. My advice to founders starting with AI integration is to begin where mistakes are expensive, not where ideas are fun. Pick one repeating document you already publish (e.g., case studies, release notes, customer emails) and write a one-page "never rules" plus success criteria. Let GPT-5 challenge the draft against that rubric and produce a pass/fail with concrete edits you can accept in one click. Judge the system by cycle time and errors avoided. If you keep a human at the final decision boundary and make the model own the pre-mortem, you'll feel the efficiency gains within a week. Thanks for the thoughtful prompt! Don't hesitate to reach out if you need more info. Cheers, Justin Brown Co-Founder, The Vessel https://thevessel.io/
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.
One way I am currently using GPT-5 to become more efficient as an entrepreneur is by streamlining research and decision-making. Instead of spending hours gathering information from multiple sources, I use GPT-5 to summarise market trends, competitor strategies, and customer insights in a way that is immediately actionable. This allows me to make faster, more informed decisions and frees up time to focus on higher-value strategic work. A specific workflow that has been especially impactful is using GPT-5 to draft and refine proposals, marketing outlines, and internal documentation. What once took half a day can now be completed in under an hour, giving me a significant productivity boost while still leaving room for my team to add the human creativity and nuance. It has also helped us keep projects moving quickly without getting bogged down in the early drafting stages. My advice to founders just starting to explore AI integration is to begin small and focus on areas where AI can remove repetitive tasks rather than replace human judgment. Start with workflows like content generation, research, or customer support automation, then expand as you learn how AI best fits your business. The key is to treat AI as a partner in efficiency, not a replacement for the strategic thinking that only you can bring.
At Magic Hour, GPT-5 has been surprisingly useful for drafting creative scripts and storyboards to pair with our video-to-video edits, which saves my team hours of back-and-forth brainstorming. I remember one campaign where we needed multiple variations overnight, and GPT-5 gave us quick drafts that we could refine rather than start from scratch. My advice to new founders is not to treat AI as a replacement for creativity--use it as a collaborator that handles first drafts so your team can focus on the vision.
At Nerdigital.com, I've started leaning on GPT-5 in a way that's less about novelty and more about creating real leverage in my day-to-day work as a founder. One of the most impactful uses has been in decision prep. Instead of going into strategy meetings with raw data, I now run our analytics and market research through GPT-5 to surface patterns and frame insights in a way that's immediately actionable. It's not making the decisions for me, but it's helping me see the big picture faster and with more clarity. A concrete example: we were evaluating whether to double down on one of our e-commerce funnels or pivot resources toward a newer channel. In the past, I'd have spent hours cross-referencing reports, competitor activity, and consumer behavior trends. Now, I can feed all of that into GPT-5, ask it to highlight risks, opportunities, and likely ROI scenarios, and walk into the discussion already armed with a synthesized view. It saves me time, but more importantly, it lets me spend that saved time on the higher-value work — actually strategizing with my team rather than drowning in spreadsheets. For communication workflows, I've also integrated GPT-5 into how we draft and refine proposals. What used to take several revisions can now get to 80% polished in one iteration, and then I step in to bring the human touch. That balance — automation plus personal refinement — has been a big unlock for productivity. If I had to give one piece of advice to founders just starting to explore AI integration, it would be this: don't chase the "wow" factor. The most meaningful applications aren't flashy; they're the ones that quietly remove friction from your day and give you back mental bandwidth. Start small. Pick one repetitive process that drains your time and experiment with automating or streamlining it. You'll quickly see that AI isn't here to replace your judgment — it's here to give you more room to use it. That shift in mindset has made me not just more efficient, but more present as a leader. Instead of getting stuck in the weeds, I'm spending more time on the conversations and decisions that actually move the company forward.