Now that we have generative AI, machine-learning technology is capable of many tasks, including creative ones. It’s shaking up industries, as you’ve no doubt heard, but what if you’re on the outside looking in?

If you’ve always wanted to try your hand as an entrepreneur but never had the time, AI can be your new business partner. It can help you overcome those barriers to entry and maybe help you learn a little something along the way. Here are a few ways that AI can help you get started.

AI Can Help You With Ideas

With this new spate of generative AI innovation, this technology can think out of the box – or at least mimic it so well that we can’t tell the difference. Chat-based AI like ChatGPT and other variations of it can be your ideas person, taking your input and brainstorming ideas despite not having a brain.

The principle here isn’t new—we have used the internet to help with business ideas in the past. In fact, many services use random generation to spontaneously come up with certain outputs, which you can tweak to get the desired outcome. For example, you could use businessnamegenerator.com to get a catchy name for your business after deciding what that business actually does. Maybe you have a seed of an idea but need some help growing it, which is where AI outshines random generation since it values your input and world context more. Then, once you have a basic premise, you can hop over to a name generator if you haven’t got one already.

Will AI serve you something innovative? No, not really since it reaches into the “soup” of the internet and finds the most logical and identifiable answers to your questions. However, that just means it finds ideas that work, for those who can make it work. If you do want innovation, it’s up to you to add a spark of human ingenuity to whatever idea AI gives you, turning it into something special.

If you’re new to these AI programs, you’ll want to take a quick look at prompt engineering to get the best possible results from your brainstorming sessions. You can find free prompt engineering advice at freecodecamp.org.

AI Can Write Docs & Refine Your Research

Now that we have ideas out of the way, here are some ways that AI can help you save time in the setup/administration of the company.

First of all, creating business documents. While it’s always best to get a human to write something that needs an engaging, familiar voice, AI can write a lot of those dry but informative documents that exist to keep you on the right path. Nobody’s business plan has ever won a Pulitzer prize, so there’s no need to pour your time and effort into one. Instead, you can prime AI to serve you a boilerplate business plan for your industry, complete with a business name.

You should always go over what your AI assistant has created to make sure it’s up to your standards. Act as its editor, tightening and correcting its output where necessary. That means knowing what goes into a business plan—investopedia.com has you covered.

If AI can handle a basic business plan, it can also create a wide variety of forms and letters that you may need. It can even write basic legalese—some AI platforms have even passed law exams. From agreements to disclaimers to terms and conditions, AI can handle it all with the right input.

AI can also do the reverse—take the content and boil it down into a summary. Get your assistant to create outlines and summaries of not just written work but videos too, thanks to certain plugins that enable ChatGPT further access to YouTube and other sites.

As a final note: remember that most internet-enabled chatbots like ChatGPT can function as a search engine too, just don’t try searching for things that happened yesterday. With AI assisting you with ideation, writing, and researching, you’re free to focus on the more practical, big-picture elements of your business.