ChatGPT is launching Business Hub!

Episode transcript

Amelia: Hi, I'm Amelia.

Paul: I'm Paul.

Tonicha: I'm Tonicha.

Amelia: And this is Fin the Week. Welcome back everyone. How are we doing?

Tonicha: Yeah, good thanks. How are you?

Paul: Good, yeah. Not a busy week.

Amelia: I'm good. Paul, you said you had a busy start to the week.

Paul: Yeah, it was jet-setting. I went over to Guernsey, so I'm back from my international travels. A half-hour flight. But yeah, back on the mainland now.

Amelia: It's tough at the top, isn't it, Paul?

Paul: Yeah. The planes aren't big enough for business class.

Amelia: The shame, the shame. So today is another one of our emergency episodes, which we've done a few of, because there's been some big news this week. The makers of ChatGPT have announced the launch of Business Hub. They said that through this Business Hub, businesses can claim their business, manage their information and see insights on how people engage with them on ChatGPT. Why is this exciting news, and why does it tie in so well with our recent theme of signal loss?

Paul: Firstly, it's exciting news because it awoke the geek in me when I read about it. It's the first brand new source of data for marketers in a while, it feels like. Ever since AI chatbots became popular, marketers have wanted to know how to track how often a brand is mentioned and things like that, and this comes with that promise in a way. So it's exciting from that perspective.

And it ties in well with our theme of signal loss because we chose this theme because the world we work in is one where data is getting less reliable and the sources of data are less reliable. Back in the day you could track everything on a website; now it's less and less available. So when you see a new tool coming along that potentially moves things in the other direction, it's an interesting thing. And it follows on directly from what we discussed last week, actually. We were talking about Google and whether they would provide click data in relation to the use of their AI tools, and ChatGPT have gazumped them in a way, jumped ahead and delivered their own tool that potentially provides that. So yeah, it's going to be an interesting one to play with.

Amelia: So, Tonicha, you've spent a bit of time looking into what this means. Let's start with our first question. What exactly is this?

Tonicha: Essentially it's a tool for businesses to sign up to with ChatGPT where they can verify their business. One thing I did question was how easy it would be for people to claim businesses that aren't theirs. I've had a look into that and you do have to follow a verification process, which is good to know. But essentially businesses are able to sign up, and from there, there are a few different aspects to it.

The first one is they're able to manage their business information directly through ChatGPT. The way I saw it, it's similar to how a lot of businesses manage their profile information on Google at the moment. So it's things like your opening hours, what your business does, what products you sell, any information you'd want on your Google Business Profile, but through ChatGPT. That's obviously useful because it's tapping into that different audience who are using ChatGPT for search rather than Google.

But also, as part of it, as Paul touched on before, you get a lot more business insights. You can see where your business is being cited in ChatGPT search results, you can see what website pages people are landing on, and it gives a whole load of information on the different topics people are searching for your business under. It's probably the first business tool that's been launched that gives you all of that information, I think. I don't know if that's definitely true, but I think it's one of the first ones, and it's the first one I've seen where it's actually through the tool itself, through ChatGPT.

It also has a chatbot. When you sign up as a business, you can be given a chatbot that you can give all the information about your business to and use that with your audience. So there are a few different bits that you get with it, but that's a rough overview of what it does.

Amelia: And for both of you, what's your knee-jerk reaction to this? Does it feel like it solves everything we've been talking about? Does it come with its own issues? What do you think?

Tonicha: In terms of what we were talking about last week with Google, one of the really interesting points I saw was that you can use ChatGPT Business to send your audience through ChatGPT advertising. A big thing we were talking about last week with the Google stuff was how advertising is going to work now that AI is such a big part of search. So it's interesting to see, because that kind of answers that question. It's given us a bit of insight into how that advertising will work. Essentially it will be sending people to your business using tools like ChatGPT Business, rather than tools like Google Ads. So that's really interesting.

Paul: Yeah, I think it can only be a good thing, because it's lifting the lid on an otherwise invisible process. I was looking at a screenshot on the announcement page on the OpenAI website and it's got a dashboard which shows you the usual suspects: mentions of your brand, profile views, which I assume means you set up a profile for your business with key details, and then website clicks, so how many people are clicking through from the platform.

But then underneath it's also got the top five discovery topics. So they're not going to show the specific search terms people use in ChatGPT, but they will show you the topics you appear for. In the example they've shown, they've got things like "gifts for kids" and "fun toy brands". That's going to be really interesting, seeing what a brand is performing for. It sounds like this is a tool which is a bit like Google Business Profile and a little bit like Google Search Console. It's kind of both of those tools merged together.

Tonicha: Yeah, that's what I took from it as well. It's like an overarching business tool that does a lot of the stuff you can do through Google at the moment for your business, but through ChatGPT. That was my main takeaway from looking into it.

Amelia: And who is it for, and do you think there's going to be a big initial uptake?

Tonicha: I think it's for any and all businesses, really. In the same way that if you were a nursery you might use a Google Business Profile, but if you're a financial services business or a law firm, you'd still want a Google Business Profile that's up to date with all your information, your working hours, where your offices are, and things like that. I think it would be a good tool for any business to have because it makes sure all your business information is correct, because you're actually able to manage it.

Otherwise, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think ChatGPT just pulls that information from other sources like your website or other areas that might not be correct, especially if your website isn't up to date or other pieces of information on the internet aren't correct. ChatGPT could pull that and give incorrect information to your audience. By managing it yourself through something like ChatGPT Business or Google Business Profile, you can mitigate that, because then the tool knows that's the absolute truth of your contact information, your opening hours, your location, that kind of thing.

So it's useful for any business. But in terms of the reporting as well, especially for big brands and financial services businesses that want to know where they're being cited and what people are searching for that lands them on their website, or at least lands them a citation in search results, I think it's very relevant for financial services, which is obviously our main client base.

Paul: Yeah. I was reading various articles about it and I wonder if they're launching a few e-commerce-specific elements first. A lot of these tools do lead with that.

Tonicha: Yeah, they've got the option to upload your main products and services onto your ChatGPT Business profile, so in a way that is an e-commerce tool itself. I think the idea is that people would then be able to order directly through this ChatGPT Business model without necessarily having to go via your website. Which comes back to some of the points we were discussing last week: you're probably going to see with all these tools, and we already have, that website traffic is declining, and it's a lot more to do with having up-to-date information in these tools. By uploading your products and services into here and having people able to buy them directly, you don't really need your website as much anymore. Which is interesting.

Amelia: If you look at where businesses were up until this point, before AI was even a thing, you'd have people within businesses who knew Google really well and understood Google, and I imagine that was the only platform they needed to know. As we move into AI, is it going to be the case that you have to be an expert in lots of different AI platforms? And is that an issue, or do you think they'll probably all work very similarly eventually anyway?

Paul: That's an interesting point that I was thinking about, because there's no clear market leader in this space at the moment. Is this another move by OpenAI to try and establish themselves as that market leader? I was scrolling through the announcement and it mentions integrating well with Shopify. Shopify drives a lot of e-commerce sites around the world, so I can imagine this becoming a tool they use to encourage Shopify site owners to add tight integration with ChatGPT, which means those online stores will probably have a way of saying "complete your purchase via your ChatGPT account", which then encourages customers to use ChatGPT more. I don't know, is that their play here?

Amelia: And I wonder, being first, is that necessarily the best? Will we eventually see someone else take over with a better product, something that works better? Or is it really important that OpenAI were the first ones?

Paul: I don't know what you think, Tonicha, but I feel like because ChatGPT was the first major brand in the generative AI space that your average person on the street knew about, they've got a built-in advantage from that.

Tonicha: I'd say yeah. If you ask the average person to name an AI tool they use regularly, most people come up with ChatGPT. You get a few people saying things like Gemini, and increasingly more people saying Claude, but generally the average person tends to think of ChatGPT. That does give them an advantage because they've got that immediate association with the general population, whereas some of the other tools are a bit more specific around the services they offer, or you might have to be a bit more advanced in using AI to use them. ChatGPT is very much something everyone can just pick up and use.

With regards to the question about whether, as marketers, we'd have to be experts in all of these tools, to some extent yes, but I think all these tools will probably be similar. In the same way that at the moment, as a marketer, you might have to be an expert in Google advertising as well as LinkedIn advertising and Meta advertising, these are just some additional tools we're going to have to learn to pick up and use. Where it's new for everyone, one advantage is that nobody's really going to be an expert, and everyone's going to be trying to figure it out for their clients.

I'd imagine across the different AI tools it would be a similar thing. With ChatGPT, they're trying to send businesses to these new ChatGPT business profiles, or sending audiences to them. That will probably be how it works for Claude and for Gemini. Whilst it might be a slightly different interface we have to learn, I imagine the tactics, the targeting and how it actually works will be similar. So hopefully it won't be too difficult, but it's definitely a whole load of new tools for us to learn.

Amelia: How easy is the setup process? They launched it this week. Can anyone just sign up now?

Tonicha: There's a waitlist.

Paul: Yeah, I believe there's a waitlist. I haven't yet got to the bottom of whether it's open only in the US and there's a waitlist elsewhere, but yeah, we're on the waitlist.

Amelia: I was going to say, are you on the waitlist?

Tonicha: Yeah, because part of our research was going to be signing up to it, starting to use it and seeing how easy it was to use, but unfortunately we can't because we're on the waitlist.

Amelia: That seems like it might have to be a future episode, right? So let's talk about what's within the tool itself. What might it look like, and what is it going to offer?

Tonicha: Essentially, think about when you search for a business on Google and it gives you that profile overview. Maybe it's got some photos of what your business does, it's got business information, where you're based, your opening hours, your contact details, maybe a biography or overview of your business, and then a few key links. It will be very similar to that. It'll pop up as a callout unit on the right-hand side when someone searches for something on ChatGPT.

It basically means that if you're signed up and your competitors aren't, you're the one more likely to pop up in that side panel with all your information and photos that you've uploaded yourself, so you know it's true. Whereas at the moment, if you're just relying on what's already on the internet for ChatGPT to aggregate and give answers, you're relying on everything it pulls being factual, and you're not actually controlling that yourself. You might be, via your website, but it's not as direct as having a ChatGPT business profile and updating it yourself.

So that's how it will look and what it will do on the audience-facing side. For the businesses themselves, it also gives them access to a tool which they can upload as much information into as they like and use as a search tool for their audience. They can deploy that on their website and elsewhere on the internet, and essentially it works like a chatbot with your audience and answers the questions they have about your business. So that's a really useful element on the other side as well.

Amelia: And I wonder what the prompt will be to make that information come up? Because presumably if you were to go on and search for Italian restaurants in a certain town, that's one thing, but would it come up if you're chatting about something more in depth and it might suggest those things to you, if that makes sense?

Tonicha: Again, it's all guesswork at the moment, but I think it will be things like you've said. If I was to type in "financial services marketing in Guernsey", then hopefully, by Indulge signing up and having our own profile, it will be us that's pulled up, with our photos and our information showing on that business profile.

Amelia: So it is kind of where you're using it more like a traditional search engine.

Tonicha: Yeah. I'm sure there'll be other ways it can be pulled up as well. If you're a real expert in your space, it might recognise that and pull up your business profile that way. But I think it will help with things like location search, because at the moment that's one area where ChatGPT is not so strong compared to Google. For me personally, I'd still go to Google if I'm looking for things near me, because I know Google has Google Maps and Google Business Profiles and pulls them up on the map. So I think it's probably trying to do something similar, so that audience is attracted from Google into ChatGPT for that too, and for the leap into geo search. But again, that's just me guessing what extra stuff it might do for businesses.

Amelia: And how useful will this be to businesses? For you guys day to day, is this really going to change the game?

Tonicha: I think it will be useful. I don't know if it would necessarily change the game, because at the moment it's still able to pull a lot of this information from your website and from the internet. But in terms of the actual advertising side of it, that could be a bit of a game changer. I saw that as part of this, you're able to set up ChatGPT adverts that direct people to your ChatGPT business profile. That could be a game changer for businesses, especially if they get in early doors. It's a very new tool, so if they get their foot in the door ahead of their competitors, all of the audience currently using ChatGPT over Google are going to be directed to their business profile, because they're the only one in their space that has one. So in that way it could be a game changer. But overall, a lot of the information it will be giving out is information it could probably already pull from the wider internet anyway.

Paul: Yeah, I think the advertising element, and the other part that'll be really interesting is that it's the first time we get proper stats from the horse's mouth in terms of how many citations and how many clicks ChatGPT delivers. That alone will make this easier to discuss among marketing teams and in boardrooms, especially if the stats are meaningful. Because if you go online, there are always some people saying ChatGPT and the like are the future of search, nobody uses classic search anymore, you've got to be there. And then you've got a whole group of other people saying slow down, it's not changing that fast. This will help to answer that question of how far ahead ChatGPT and those kinds of tools are in terms of replacing the likes of Google. So it's going to be interesting. I think it will definitely drive a lot of conversation among marketing teams.

Amelia: We've talked about how it will benefit businesses and potentially be better for consumers, but what will this mean for the AI companies? Obviously there's a financial benefit, but in what other ways is this going to benefit them?

Tonicha: I think mainly it will be financial, because of the advertising aspect. In a weird, nerdy way, I feel like I've been waiting to see how advertising is going to work for all these tools for quite a long time. As soon as they came about, I was thinking this would be a great tool if you could pay to have your search results appear at the top over your competitors, especially when it's new and there aren't many other people doing it. As marketers, we knew that was going to happen at some point, so to see it happening now is quite interesting. From their perspective, they'll be making a lot of money from people paying for this new type of advertising.

But I suppose it also gives them a wealth of new information and data from the businesses themselves. They're now getting direct data from someone who actually works with the business, giving them that information and making sure it's all credible and factual. Up until now, it's just been pulling that information from other sources that they can't necessarily verify are up to date or correct. So more factual data is another plus side for ChatGPT as part of this, but I think mainly it will be revenue.

Paul: Yeah. I was going to say as well, I think it will benefit their brand, because it elevates ChatGPT above all of the other tools. Companies will now be discussing ChatGPT internally: have we got our business profile set up? How is it working? There are other AI tools out there, Claude and Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, which are all potentially being used by customers in exactly the same way, but businesses won't be discussing them in the same way because they don't have this tool available. ChatGPT is the only one they can exert some form of control over. I think that will elevate their brand as a concept and a thing people think about.

Amelia: And when we look specifically at financial services, how will this be helpful?

Paul: I was interested in the agentic stuff they put in the announcement. What are the words they use? They say eligible organisations can build, test and launch a business agent, a new way to answer questions and help people explore their offerings. So they're saying you can build an agent that people chat to and ask questions. I think that's useful from a financial services point of view, if nothing else just to tie down what the tool can and can't say.

Tonicha: It's almost like an additional free customer service option for financial services, because from the looks of it, and I've only read up on it quite briefly, they can give that business agent as much information as they like, and the more the better. That agent can then answer questions in a way that works for that business, how they would want it answered if it was a customer service person on the phone. That's really useful, because they can direct their ads straight to that agent and have people asking questions that the agent answers the way they'd like. So I think that's a really useful tool for financial services, like you said, Paul, and the ads themselves will obviously be quite useful as well.

Paul: Yeah. I think from a regulatory point of view, the fact that firms will be able to have their compliance teams check what the agent can and can't do will be seen as a big benefit. They will prefer people using an agent that has been trained on their material via ChatGPT, as opposed to vanilla ChatGPT, which doesn't have the guardrails. So that could be very useful.

Amelia: And do you think it will be quite easy to use, quite straightforward? Do you think there'll be some hesitancy and some nerves about using it correctly and getting it right? Or do you think it's going to be so intuitive that we won't need to worry about that?

Tonicha: With these tools, it always depends on the user. With something like Google Business Profile, I actually find it's not that user-friendly. I've managed a few Google Business Profiles for clients in the past, and I know how to use it now, but it's quite a process. Things like getting your business verified on a Google Business Profile can be really difficult and quite lengthy. So I hope this will be better and more straightforward, but it probably depends on a few different factors, like who's trying to set it up. If it's their job, a marketer who knows how to use it and is familiar with the tool, then hopefully it'll be a bit easier. But if it's someone who's managing a nursery or a hairdresser's and isn't so familiar with this kind of thing, it might feel more complicated.

Hopefully, overall, they'll try and make it as user-friendly as possible, because that benefits them: more people will use it. In theory it should be quite straightforward, but these things aren't always as straightforward as they're intended to be, especially when it's a new tool. And as I say, I think the verification process in particular could cause a few issues and make things more difficult. We'll have to see.

Paul: Yeah, I made a note about the verification process, actually. I saw someone online mention that you've got to watch out for people hijacking your business profile. You type in the business name and click to claim it, and then there's a verification step which I believe is based on a text or a phone call to a business number. But that sort of thing isn't necessarily impossible to overcome for someone who's determined enough. I imagine they've got checks and balances in place to stop that being a huge problem, but any brand that's been around long enough should claim their business ASAP, just to make sure no one else tries to claim it, because then they've probably got a bit of a battle to get it back.

Amelia: And how soon do you think we'll see competitors launching their equivalents? Do you think that will come really quickly now?

Paul: I wonder if this will prompt Google to start delivering click data, like we were talking about last week, in relation to their AI search tools. I feel like it will. I think it will prompt them to launch some big new version of Google Search Console that gives you a lot more information, so they can say, "Ignore ChatGPT, we are still the powerful player in this market." As for the others, I don't know. Claude and Copilot feel far less set up and on the verge of doing something like this. I don't know what makes me say that; it just feels like that's not their focus.

Amelia: They haven't told you?

Paul: No, no.

Tonicha: For me personally, I use Claude a lot more for its co-working skills, and I use ChatGPT more for search. I don't know if that's just a personal thing or a trend we're seeing elsewhere, but I've used ChatGPT a lot more as a search tool, as a replacement for how I would previously have used Google, whereas with Claude I tend to use it for work, actually using it as an agent and doing things with it that way. So for ChatGPT this makes a lot of sense, because if the consumer is using it as a search tool, as a replacement for Google, it's quite important they get this stuff right. Whereas for Claude, where people are using it in that different way, and I'm sure people are also using it for traditional search, but they are using it differently, maybe it's not as much of a priority, and they might be focusing on other areas. So we might not find that all the different tools come up with the same thing at once. They might go for different USPs. We'll have to see what happens.

Amelia: It will be interesting to see how things go. And as you say, you guys are on the waitlist. Is there any indication of how long the waitlist is?

Paul: There wasn't for me, no.

Tonicha: I don't think so.

Amelia: Really building the hype, isn't it? Well, fingers crossed, once you're in, it would be interesting to do another episode to look at it in a bit more detail. So if you're not on the waitlist, get on it. Before we go, shall we do some Jargon Busters?

Paul: Yeah, let's give it a go. See how we do.

Tonicha: I'm not very strong at this game.

Amelia: Well, we'll see, Tonicha. You never know, it could be your day. So every week I bring a different term from our list of industry terms and phrases, and we see if you guys can come up with an explanation or definition. Our term this week is liquidity. What do we reckon?

Tonicha: If someone goes bankrupt, is that not liquidity?

Paul: Isn't that an absence of liquidity, in a way? Is liquidity how much real money you have available right now? Your assets aren't tied up in other things. That's not a very good dictionary definition, but...

Tonicha: For some reason it makes me think of football teams. I'm sure a football team can go into liquidity, but I'm not sure exactly what that means.

Paul: Is it when you liquidate something, you're basically turning all of the non-cash assets back into cash? That's part of the process of closing something down, I think.

Amelia: It officially means how quickly an asset can be bought or sold without affecting its price.

Paul: Bought or sold without affecting its price. Okay. Yeah, no, I was nowhere near that.

Amelia: Well, I could see what you were trying to get at, Paul. Another one we've learned. But well done, you gave it a good go. Thank you so much, it was a really interesting episode today. Of course, we will be back next Friday. Have a great weekend.

Tonicha: Thank you. Bye.