ChatGPT for Business: What It's Actually Good At and Where It Falls Short

You’ve probably had a go with ChatGPT by now. Maybe you asked it to write a marketing email. Maybe you pasted in a document and asked for a summary. Maybe you tried it once, got a mediocre result, and moved on.

Here’s the thing: ChatGPT is a genuinely useful business tool — if you know where to point it. Most business owners either underuse it (treating it as a novelty) or overestimate it (expecting it to replace skilled staff). The reality is somewhere in between, and the specifics matter.

Where ChatGPT Delivers Real Value

Drafting Proposals and Quotes

Feed ChatGPT the key details — client name, scope of work, pricing, special conditions — and ask it to draft the proposal. You’ll get a professionally written document in 30 seconds that would have taken 30-45 minutes from scratch.

The output isn’t perfect first time. You’ll adjust tone, fix assumptions, and add specifics only you know. But editing a solid draft is dramatically faster than staring at a blank page.

Pro tip: Create a saved prompt that includes your company name, standard terms, tone preferences, and a sample proposal. Paste it plus job-specific details each time. The output will match your style much more closely.

Analysing Spreadsheet Data

Upload a CSV or Excel file and ask questions in plain English. “Which product had the highest margin last quarter?” “Which customers haven’t ordered in 90 days?” ChatGPT writes the analysis code, runs it, and gives you the answer — often with a chart. For a business owner who doesn’t know pivot tables, this is transformative.

The limitation: ChatGPT works on one file at a time. It can’t connect to your CRM, pull from accounting software, and cross-reference timesheets in a single analysis.

Customer and Market Research

“What are the main pain points for fleet managers in logistics?” or “What are the typical decision criteria for warehouse security?” — you’ll get a well-organised overview in seconds. This doesn’t replace talking to actual customers, but it gives you background research that used to take hours of Googling.

Where it falls short: ChatGPT’s knowledge has a cutoff date. It doesn’t have real-time market data, pricing, or your local competitive landscape. General patterns, not specific intelligence.

Content Creation

Blog posts, email newsletters, product descriptions, job ads. Quality varies by task:

• First drafts of long-form content: Good starting point to refine with your expertise.
• Social media and short copy: Decent, but tends towards generic without very specific instructions.
• Technical or industry-specific content: Gets concepts right but often lacks depth from actual experience.

Summarising Documents

Paste a contract, meeting transcript, or tender document and ask for a summary, key actions, or specific information. A 30-page tender gets condensed to key requirements in seconds — telling you whether it’s worth pursuing before you invest hours reading.

Where ChatGPT Wastes Your Time

Anything requiring current data. “What’s the current price of steel reinforcing bar in Perth?” — you’ll get a confident answer that may be months out of date. For information that changes regularly, verify independently.

Complex business decisions. “Should I open a second location?” ChatGPT will give a thoughtful-sounding analysis that misses every nuance of your cash flow, market, and risk tolerance. These decisions require judgment AI doesn’t have.

Anything involving your private business data. ChatGPT doesn’t know your customers, pricing, or margins. Every analysis requires manual extraction, upload, and explanation. Fine for occasional questions. Doesn’t scale for daily use.

The “Copy-Paste Ceiling”

Here’s the pattern I see with every business that uses ChatGPT seriously:

Month 1: “This is amazing. I drafted three proposals in the time it used to take for one.”

Month 3: “I use it constantly. But I spend a lot of time copying data in and out, and re-explaining my context every conversation.”

Month 6: “I wish it was just plugged in. I wish it already knew my pricing, my customers, my processes.”

This is the copy-paste ceiling. ChatGPT is general-purpose. Every session starts from zero. You’re the integration layer — manually moving information between ChatGPT and your business systems.

For occasional use, that’s fine. When you’re using it daily, the manual overhead becomes the bottleneck.

When You Need Something Custom

• You’re using the same prompts repeatedly. That’s a system waiting to be automated — connected to your data and triggered automatically.
• Multiple people need the same capability. One person’s prompt library doesn’t scale to a team of ten. You need a consistent, shared tool.
• Data sensitivity requires control. If you can’t send data to OpenAI’s servers, a custom solution using self-hosted models keeps everything under your roof.
• You need reliability. ChatGPT’s output varies. For processes requiring consistent output — quoting, compliance documentation, customer communications — you need guardrails and validation.

Getting More Out of ChatGPT Right Now

1. Build a prompt library. Document the prompts that work. Share them so your team uses them consistently.
2. Use Custom GPTs. Create custom versions with pre-loaded instructions and knowledge about your business.
3. Upload reference documents. Style guide, product catalogue, pricing sheet — upload them so ChatGPT has context without you explaining everything.
4. Be specific. “Write a proposal” gives poor results. “Write a proposal for a 12-camera installation for a 2,000sqm warehouse, including mounting, cabling, and NVR. Professional but not stuffy.” gives excellent results.
5. Always review the output. ChatGPT confidently produces text that sounds right but is factually wrong. Every number and claim needs a human check.

ChatGPT is both over-hyped and under-utilised. Most businesses could get significantly more value with better prompts and clearer understanding of its strengths. And when it stops being enough — when the copy-pasting gets old and you need AI that plugs into your operations — that’s when custom software turns a useful tool into a genuine competitive advantage.