Tools and ways of working
ChatGPT for work: a practical start
For many people, ChatGPT is their first encounter with AI. What you can do with it at work, which features help most and what to watch out for.
5 min read
OpenAI's ChatGPT is the first AI assistant many people use. It's an all-rounder: writing, summarising, translating, thinking things through, reading documents and searching the web. Here's how to get more out of it at work.
Features that help most
- Uploading files: have PDFs, Word documents or spreadsheets summarised or analysed.
- Web search: for current information, with sources you open yourself.
- Projects: group conversations and files around one topic, with fixed instructions.
- Custom GPTs: an assistant with fixed instructions and documents for a recurring task.
- Voice: talk to the assistant out loud, handy for rehearsing a conversation or dictating ideas.
Which features are available depends on your plan.
Personal or business
For work with company data, you're best choosing a business version such as ChatGPT Business or Enterprise. Your data isn't used to train models by default there, and you manage the accounts yourself. If you do use a personal account, turn off improving the model in the data controls.
A good start
- Write custom instructions: who you are, which company you work for, what tone you want.
- Create a project for a recurring topic, for example customer service or quotes.
- Save your best prompts so you can reuse them.
- Check the memory now and then.
Watch out for
- Answers can be wrong. Check the facts.
- Shared links to conversations can be opened by others.
- Only connect other apps if you need them.
Checklist
Your answers stay only in this browser.
Prompt to copy
I'm [role] at a [type of business]. Help me write my custom instructions for ChatGPT: ask me eight short questions about my work, my customers and the tone I want, then turn them into a text of no more than 150 words.
