I thought AI was too complex until I saw how easily it could sort emails & share business intelligence

I will admit, I have been unsure about the benefits of AI.

At work, my colleagues and I mostly use AI for grammar checks and reviewing content.

While we definitely see its merits, beyond that, using AI for any further benefit feels like we need to spend more time figuring it out – time that unfortunately, we do not have because of our workload.

And it would seem that this is a prevalent sentiment among many SMEs. In the Singapore Business Federation’s National Business Survey 2025, nearly half of all firms surveyed cited lack of knowledge and expertise, as well as high costs of implementation with regard to adopting AI.

After all, it can feel overwhelming, having to think about how to make use of AI better, particularly if you are in a small business. Why should I be typing more prompts into AI, not when I have emails that need to be replied or messages to colleagues that need to be sent?

Plus, our usage with AI feels experimental and informal. Not all of my colleagues use AI, and some of them, such as my colleagues on the video team, would probably see it as a distraction from their daily job of editing and shooting videos for instance.

But all that being said, the few of us who do use it are cognisant of how there’s much more that can be achieved with AI. The question is: How do we go about it?

I was therefore excited when I was given the opportunity to attend Enterprise Singapore’s AI workshop titled “Turn Sales Data into Business Action”, hosted by GrabAcademy and OpenAI.

Using AI to cut down on your administrative work

As the workshop’s name suggests, it is primarily aimed at teaching attendees how to key better prompts into ChatGPT to make sense of their sales and cost data, create marketing visuals, organise workflows and even gain business insights.

The first thing that struck me upon starting the workshop was finding out that ChatGPT has a Work version. Specifically, a version that allows you to plug in Gmail, Google Drive and many other applications.

Suffice to say, when the first lesson in the workshop involved simply trying out ChatGPT, I ended up asking it to read my emails and update me on my timeline, as well as help me sort out my emails by deadline and client.

After some refining of my instructions, I found that it was able to do so with a very high degree of accuracy, much to my amazement.

If you have ever wondered how to cut down on your neverending pile of administrative work at the office, this is a tool you should definitely check out.

Small business owners might appreciate a means of being able to quickly see what their important emails are in the morning, and asking ChatGPT to help craft a reply so that they can focus on other more important matters.

And speaking of asking ChatGPT to craft something, being distracted in sorting out my emails with ChatGPT meant I had missed out the exercise for the workshop’s first lesson – getting ChatGPT to respond to a poor customer review, and asking it specific questions to improve the quality of the response.

If your business is a cafe for instance, you would probably appreciate the ease of having ChatGPT generate a reply for you, instead of having to work on crafting one entirely from scratch.

Talk about service recovery finally being made simple and convenient.

ChatGPT can also serve as a useful tool to guide your business analysis

For the next part of the workshop we were tasked with conducting business analysis with ChatGPT – researching trends, rent, competitors and locations with regard to setting up a cafe in Singapore.

For the sake of roleplaying, and to give an added challenge to the workshop’s exercise, I decided to ask ChatGPT these questions in relation to opening a cafe that serves insects in Bugis, with the aim of improving traffic on Tuesday and Thursday.

Impressively, it was able to give me an analysis that first broke down consumer trends, and provide its own hypothesis of what customers might be looking for.

It was also able to share which locations could serve as an ideal location for a new cafe and was even able to account for insects permitted under the Singapore Food Agency’s (SFA) framework.

On top of that it could even generate a table giving some rough estimates of the cost in setting up a cafe, broken down by item.

At the end of it all, ChatGPT was even able to generate a document detailing the next steps that should be taken, complete with what should be done to understand the prices of nearby competitors, to better price our own products.

At this point, we were taught how to input an important prompt into ChatGPT – to separate information from assumptions, given that it is prone to mix information with its own interpretation.

Another important prompt is to ask ChatGPT how it arrives at such numbers and to indicate its sources so that you can do your own verification.

Those of you who are actual cafe owners or aspiring entrepreneurs might appreciate how this can serve as a useful starting point in carrying out your own research and analysis into any new neighbourhood or consumer base for your own cafe, or even as a handy method in organising your own thoughts.

Running sales analysis

We were then brought to the third and last lesson of the workshop – carrying out analysis and generating images.

Again, I found myself amazed by how the tool was able to take the sample excel sheets we were provided with to give a breakdown of the cost and profit for the items sold in our sample “cafe”.

It was also able to create a new chart that showed a breakdown of the bestselling items per hour based on the information provided.

I then followed the instructions to get ChatGPT to re-engineer my menu and indicate my recommended next steps.

This included keeping Teh C as the default drink of choice in the Insect Explorer Breakfast Set, and retaining the traditional Kaya Butter Toast Set, while adding an optional side of cricket.

If you are someone who has always felt intimidated by spreadsheets for instance, because of the insurmountable wall of formulas and models, AI can definitely help you tremendously in this aspect.

You don’t have to worry about needing any special data analyst skills – all you need to do is to upload a set of data into ChatGPT and voila, you have a powerful tool that can help you make sense of your data and even present insights for you to work with.

Powerful practical daily applications

It was at this point that I realised – it’s not that difficult to use AI to get what you want after all.

Not only that, but the capabilities it provides are pretty handy – cutting down on your administrative work, providing business analysis and making sense of your sales data among many more things.

If you have to wear many hats at work, from sales to finance, because your business is modest, this is definitely one such AI tool you want by your side, given that it can help you save a tremendous amount of time in doing things like replying emails or generating excel sheets.

Getting better results for your business now no longer requires any special technical expertise; all you really need to do is to have an idea of what you want to know.

And even if you don’t have the clearest idea, AI can still serve as a useful starting point to begin your exploration and research for your learning process, or to help you solve any specific issue you might have.

Want to see how AI could help your business save time, reduce manual work and make better decisions?

Find out more about EnterpriseSG’s Driving Entrepreneurship with AI workshops here.

This sponsored article made the author decide to make ChatGPT an integral part of his daily work