AI:1)Exactly how to get your site indexed by chat.gpt; 2)Supercharge your efficiency: Smart, budget-friendly AI hacks for entrepreneurs; 3)The skills people still perform better than AI, according to workplace experts

1)Supercharge your efficiency: Smart, budget-friendly AI hacks for entrepreneurs

Courtesy of BDC: Dominic Gagnon, Guest contributor – Author, Investor, Entrepreneur and Speaker, BDC’s Entrepreneur in residence

Table of contents

I see artificial intelligence (AI) as more than just a tool—it’s the driving force behind my efficiency.

As a business owner, I use AI for a wide variety of tasks.

• Writing: It can draft texts in minutes—anything from emails to proposals to social media posts.

• Synthesizing information: It analyzes long documents like contracts and transcriptions, giving me the top three things that matter.

• Organizing work: AI can generate outlines, optimize processes and turn a 45-minute conversation into an action plan with owners and deadlines.

• Managing tasks: It helps me with administrative to dos such as triaging my email inbox, scheduling meetings and processing invoices.

Most importantly, none of these uses cost me a lot of money or require complex technical expertise. I can’t be the only entrepreneur who has figured this out—so, if you’re not taking advantage of AI yet, you can be sure that some of your competitors are.

“Many business owners are convinced that AI is not for them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyone can use AI.” Dominic Gagnon: Investor, Entrepreneur and Speaker, BDC’s Entrepreneur in residence

What AI really means for an entrepreneur

You might be wondering what all this means in tangible terms. AI helps me:

• Boost revenue: I can respond faster, so my clients get answers in minutes instead of hours. This means more people get the information they need to move forward with their purchase, which ultimately leads to more sales.

• Save money: AI helps me cut down administrative time, saving me thousands of dollars each year. If you consider the average salary for an administrative role and eliminate two hours of unnecessary work every day, the total savings can reach $25,000 annually.

• Improve competitiveness: AI raises mistakes or key points quickly that it would normally take me much longer to spot myself, if at all. This allows me to make better decisions for my business faster.

3 ways you can start using AI right now

The easiest way to get started, is by using a generative AI tool like Cohere, ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot or Gemini. With the right prompts, any of these tools can help speed up tasks that normally take much longer. For a small fee, you can get the professional version to secure your data. Otherwise, just be sure not to input any proprietary information.

SEE LINK BELOW: Tasks AI helps me with AND The Purpose, Prompt and What it is Good For

Purpose: Emails

Prompt: Write a response to an unhappy client. Acknowledge the problem with empathy, propose a clear solution and close with a next step. Keep under five lines.

Good For:

• Drafting difficult replies

• Work complaints

• Delays

• Refusals

Sales Give me five compelling ways to position [product or service] to [specific type of customer]. Focus on the pain they want to eliminate, not the features. Generating new angles or positioning

• Proposal

• Pitch

• Customer conversation

Workflows Read this document and give me: (1) the three key decisions I need to make, (2) the top risk and (3) the recommended next step. Cutting through information overload

• Contracts

• Reports

• Meeting notes

Just remember to be as specific as possible in your prompt and always review what the AI generates.

“Some of the AI tools I use cost less than $20/month. But most of them replace what used to cost me thousands of dollars in hours.”

Dominic Gagnon, Author, Investor, Entrepreneur and Speaker, BDC’s Entrepreneur in residence

Examples of AI tools I use every day – Tasks AI helps me with AND AI tools I use to boost my efficiency

I want to give you some concrete examples of how I use AI every day. I am not endorsing specific products—I’m simply sharing the types of tools I use so you can see how AI helps me save time and boost efficiency.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15ioIxrqNB0blDzVyyGenCqZbKa_7H5a6/view?usp=sharing

Many of these tools are readily available and cost me less than $200 per month. But they help me save more than 10 hours per week.

What entrepreneurs often get wrong about AI

Many business owners are convinced that AI is not for them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyone can use AI.

Here are the most common misconceptions I hear from entrepreneurs.

AI doesn’t work for my business or industry.

Every type of business from restaurants to manufacturers can benefit from AI. In fact, the less “tech” your industry, the bigger the opportunity.

For example, if you’re a restaurant, AI can help you build menus, manage food orders, take reservations and more. Plus, every type of business has accounting, invoicing, purchasing and other management tasks that AI can optimize.

Adopting AI is too complex to set up.

Not all AI requires an IT team or consultant. The efficiency tools I shared with you only require a credit card and a problem to solve, whether that’s managing your inbox or improving your customer service. You can be up and running with any of these types of AI tools in less than 30 minutes.

AI is too expensive.

Some of the AI tools I use cost less than $20/month. But most of them replace what used to cost me thousands of dollars in hours.

Just to be clear, there’s more than one kind of AI out there.

The easy-to-use efficiency boosters I’ve been talking about

The organization-level solutions that are more complex and costly to adopt

But even the robust AI solutions are an investment worth making when applied to the right process—it’s only a matter of time before you make back your investment in efficiency gains.

Start using AI now, not later

AI is changing how businesses get ahead. More companies use it every day to cut costs, save time and make better decisions quickly.

A year from now, there will be two types of business owners: those who jumped in with AI—faster and more competitive—and those who wish they had.

How to start using AI efficiency tools

Here’s my challenge for you—don’t wait. Start today.

1. Choose a repetitive task you or your team do every day that takes at least 30 minutes.

2. Find an AI tool that can help. Look online—lots of tools have free trials and are easy to try.

3. Use the tool for two weeks, and see what happens. You might save an hour, at first. That hour can turn into five—and that gives you an edge.

If you want to explore more robust AI solutions, the approach is similar. You don’t need to be a large business or undertake a huge transformation.

4. Pick one repetitive end-to-end process that’s inefficient and wastes time. You might find off-the-shelf AI tools that can help. If you need to build something more custom, the money saved in efficiency gains will soon cover the cost of your initial investment.

Next step

Adopt AI, digital tools and smart equipment, work with Canadian AI companies, and get preferential-rate consulting and financing with BDC’s LIFT program.

Related topics

Is it possible to work fewer hours as an entrepreneur?

https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/entrepreneurial-skills/be-effective-leader/is-it-possible-work-fewer-hours-entrepreneur

How technology boosts your productivity without hiring new workers: https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/technology/invest-technology/how-technology-boosts-productivity-without-hiring-new-workers

How can AI help my business?

https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/technology/invest-technology/how-can-ai-help-my-businessEntrepreneur story

Agency not afraid to ask AI some questions

https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/technology/invest-technology/agency-not-afraid-to-ask-ai-some-questions

2) How to Get Your WebSite Indexed By Chat.GPT

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-get-indexed-by-chatgpt

Note from Patricia: This is an interesting development in helping to make your website findable by AI – and one of the reasons I’ve also been letting people know how to write for AI…

If you want to know how to get indexed by ChatGPT, this article will show you, but first, I want to clarify: Other articles on this topic conflate “getting indexed by” with “showing up in” ChatGPT — and they are not the same thing. Getting indexed by ChatGPT means OpenAI’s search crawler discovered your page and stored it in OpenAI’s proprietary index (about which very little is publicly known). Showing up in ChatGPT means your content appeared in an answer, which can happen via that index or via a live web fetch triggered by a user’s query.

See the link for the full story from Hubspot

3)The skills people still perform better than AI, according to workplace experts

Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press

By Cathy Bussewitz, June 14, 2026

But what if people have qualities both unmistakably human and essential to career success that AI could not easily replace them?

Some workplace experts argue that with more businesses adopting AI tools, soft skills such as empathy, critical thinking and ethical decision-making are worth cultivating to help employees become indispensible.

Across industries and occupations, “the skills that are most resistant to displacement by AI are the ones that are the most distinctly human,” Maria Flynn, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit focused on workforce development, said. “Some of those things are relationship building, conflict resolution, the ability to guide and motivate other people and ethical judgment.”

Even in job listings for technical roles such as IT support, organizations say they’re looking for candidates who communicate well and take leadership initiative, Flynn said.

“We started to use the term ‘durable skills’ and think about them as capabilities that really are durable, in that they hold their value across economic shifts and technological change and labor market disruption,” she said. “And we think, especially now, in this time of AI advancement, that it’s the durable skills that really make a worker genuinely valuable at work, regardless of what tools and technology are available.”

Empathy

Interpreting body language and reading between the lines to decipher what wasn’t explicitly communicated are skills that many people find are best performed by humans. They also inform the ability to show empathy, and being sensitive to the feelings of others is a sought-after trait in workers.

Marco Iansiti, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said he saw that firsthand during a hospital stay.

“A nurse has incredibly human impacts. Feeling, relating to the patient, the type of care that is so important,” Iansiti said. “I remember times when I was sick in the hospital and the nurse was like the godsend. Would I have let a robot do the same thing? No. There was a human connection there that I found very valuable.”

Where AI could be helpful in a hospital setting is by taking on mundane tasks such as paperwork, freeing up time for nurses to provide compassionate patient care, he said.

“There’s a lot of systems that are being deployed now that I think are very effective in doing this and essentially release healthcare workers to do the things that they should be doing and do best.”

Nurturing relationships

Building strong personal ties with colleagues, clients and stakeholders remains a prized skill that experts say artificial intelligence models have difficulty replicating. Salespeople, for example, have files or databases with information they’ve learned about their clients from interacting face-to-face.

“You have people that have trusted you and have bought products from you for the last 10 years. That has value and that’s hard to transfer to artificial intelligence,” Iansiti said.

Interpersonal skills also are invaluable when conflicts arise. “Having that human in the loop to manage those expectations, to ease any ruffled feathers, to build the type of relationships that are needed, to expedite good work, is still going to be critical,” Flynn said.

Conflict resolution is a must-have quality for managers, said Colleen Adler, director analyst in the human resources practice at the Gartner consulting firm.

“People do still have managers, and managers and leaders impact the way they feel, and co-workers impact the ways we feel as well,” Adler said. “There is still a tone to AI that does not yet mimic human connection. That could change; I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Work environments are rapidly changing and many employees feel like they’re lurching from one difficult dynamic to another, Adler said. While AI agents can’t help workers feel better about that uncertainty, strong leaders can help their teams, she added.

Critical thinking

Artificial intelligence models collect information and produce responses but can generate inaccuracies, so it’s important to second-guess its output. Developing deep knowledge about your field can help you notice when the AI-generated results on topics from your industry are incorrect, said Amalia Kaufman, course developer and instructor at the University of California, Irvine Division of Continuing Education.

“You have to have the cognition and the critical thinking and the subject matter expertise to make sense of it, and to know when it’s wrong,” Kaufman said. “You have to check your facts.”

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford tested 11 popular AI systems and found that artificial intelligence chatbots were prone to flattering and validating the feelings of users, affirming a user’s actions 49% more often than humans did. Taking a step back and applying critical thinking skills when reading results generated by AI can help combat the tendency for it to be overly agreeable with its users.

Having a conscience

The ability to distinguish right from wrong, or listen to one’s inner conscience, is a skill that is innately human, experts said.

Sometimes, people rely on sensations in their bodies to help guide their decision-making. “Gut feelings are something you feel in your gut,” Iansiti said. “It’s not just a pattern of information that’s going through your brain. It is actually an emotional reaction that is intrinsically different from the way that AI operates. At least this generation of AI.”

When life-or-death decisions have to be made, such as when to use lethal military force, “do you want something that does not have human emotion, it does not have a body attached with the intelligence?” Iansiti asked. “AI can fake having a conscience because it’s read about what a conscience is, but it doesn’t have a conscience.”

People can build parameters, or guardrails, into artificial intelligence models to help AI agents make ethical decisions, he said. But human input is still required.

“It’s very hard to design a model that’s ethical for everything. It’s much better to build it around a specific use case. Say hiring,” Iansiti said.

Judgement calls

Ethical questions aren’t the only ones that AI is less equipped to handle for now. The capacity to come up with creative ideas and make decisions in ambiguous situations — while mapping out strategies or developing a brand identity, for example — is another important human skill, experts said.

“We don’t believe that’s something that’s going to be replicated by artificial intelligence,” said Heather Stefanski, chief learning and development officer at management consulting firm McKinsey. “If we’re all just using the AI answer to problem-solve, how are you really going to be distinctive?”

Humans make judgment calls based on a constellation of knowledge and lived experiences, Flynn said. Artificial intelligence draws from a lot of data but doesn’t necessarily work well in gray areas, Flynn said. For now, the ability to see all angles of an issue and add context remains a form of intelligence that people possess to a greater extent than AI, she said.“The things that make us uniquely human to me are going to continue to be the things that help our society thrive in productive ways,” Flynn said. “And making sure that we are calling those things out, paying attention to them, making sure those are attributes that folks can name and articulate and feel good about, is going to be key as we all navigate a rapidly changing future.”