ChatGPT for business: how to use it safely

What can you use ChatGPT for in business?

ChatGPT is a language model. It's good at anything to do with text: writing, rewriting, summarising, translating and structuring. It's less good at facts, current figures and calculations that have to be exactly right. Tasks that often work well:

• A first draft of an email, newsletter, job ad or social post.
• Summarising a long text into five points, for example meeting minutes or a terms and conditions document.
• Translating texts or changing their tone, from formal to informal.
• Brainstorming names, angles or questions for a customer meeting.
• Turning a messy list into a table or step-by-step plan.
• Asking for an explanation of a term or an Excel formula you don't understand.

Use it as a starting point, not a finished product. You remain responsible for what goes to a customer.

A real-world example. An installer gets a long email from a customer who's unhappy about a schedule. Instead of puzzling over it for half an hour, he pastes the anonymised email into ChatGPT and asks it to list the three main points and suggest a calm reply. He adjusts the reply to what he can actually promise and sends it within ten minutes. The thinking stays his; the typing doesn't.

Which version suits your business?

There's a free version, a paid version for one person and business plans such as Team and Enterprise. For a business, the biggest difference isn't smarter answers, but management and privacy. With the business plans you manage users centrally, and the provider states that your data isn't used to train models by default. With separate personal accounts, you have to set that yourself for each account.

If several people work with it and customer information comes up, a business plan is usually the safest choice. As a guide, allow a few tens of euros per user per month, but check the current price, as it changes regularly.

What should you never put into ChatGPT?

This is the most important part. What you type into a chat goes to the provider's servers. Even with the best settings, you want to be careful with that. At the very least, don't enter:

• Personal data of customers or employees, such as names with addresses, citizen service numbers (BSN) or medical information.
• Passwords, API keys or login details.
• Confidential contracts, pricing agreements or trade secrets.
• Customers' financial data.

Still want a customer email rewritten? Remove names and details first, or replace them with [customer] and [company]. Read more about the rules in our article on AI and the GDPR. Unsure about a specific situation? Ask a lawyer or check with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens).

How to write good prompts

A prompt is the instruction you give ChatGPT. The clearer the instruction, the more useful the answer. A good prompt often contains four things:

• Role: 'You're a customer service assistant at an installation company.'
• Task: 'Write a reply to this complaint about a late engineer.'
• Context: who the customer is, what happened, what you can and can't promise.
• Format: length, tone (formal or informal), bullet points or running text.

Not happy? Ask follow-up questions. 'Shorter', 'less formal' or 'give me three versions' often works better than starting again. Save prompts that work well in a shared document, so your team can reuse them.

Always check the output

ChatGPT sounds confident, even when it's wrong. It can invent facts, legal articles or sources that look real. That's called hallucinating. So check:

• Figures, dates and names: do they match your own sources?
• Legal or tax statements: have them checked by someone who knows the subject.
• Tone and promises: does this fit how you talk to customers, and can you deliver on it?
• Originality: does the text look too much like a standard text everyone uses?

Agree an AI policy with your team

If several people use ChatGPT at work, put a few agreements on paper. It doesn't have to be a thick document. One page with these points is enough:

• Which tools are allowed, and with which account.
• Which data must never go in.
• That someone always checks the output before it goes out.
• Who to turn to with questions or doubts.

Since the European AI Act, you also have to make sure that people who work with AI know enough about how it works and what the risks are. Read more in our piece on the EU AI Act for SMEs.

From one-off chats to a fixed way of working

Notice you're pasting the same kind of instruction into ChatGPT every day? That's a sign you can automate the process. Think of emails that automatically get a draft reply, or quotes built from a fixed template. That then happens through an integration with your own systems, with clear rules about which data goes in. A good place to start is our overview of AI for SMEs.

Need help with AI in your business?

At Violexa we help business owners use AI smartly and safely. Sometimes that's a short explanation and a good set of prompts. Sometimes it's an integration that automatically prepares emails, documents or quotes. See our AI & automation service. A custom solution starts from €1,799 excl. VAT (€2,177 incl. VAT), one-off. Larger projects get a fixed price up front, in writing.

Not sure where to start? Book a free quickscan. In 30 minutes, online or at your location, we look together at where ChatGPT or an automation will really save you time. Afterwards you get short written advice with a price indication. You're not committed to anything.

Frequently asked questions