Against a purple-pink backdrop, Nat Choprasert stares at her ring light.
She holds a desk microphone in her right hand and taps the record button on her phone with her left. Then she explains how to trick AI detectors in 35 seconds with an essay or blog post from ChatGPT.
Choprasert uploaded this video to TikTok on December 19, 2022 and the reaction changed her career.
“Everyone knows ChatGPT by now, but when it first came out I made a video about it that got a million views,” says Choprasert. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I should probably create more content about that.'”
Two months before posting the viral video, Choprasert had sold her e-commerce tea business, Life of Cha, and was struggling to find a niche as a business consultant. The more than one million views on her TikTok video made it clear that artificial intelligence made her stand out.
Over a year later, Choprasert is an enterprise AI and automation specialist on a mission to demystify AI. She founded Future AI Lab and helps companies implement AI to save time and increase revenue.
Although generative AI is a young industry, Choprasert has already positioned itself as a pacesetter in AI education. She speaks at conferences worldwide and shares her insights with more than 400,000 social media followers and over 18,000 newsletter subscribers.
What sets Choprasert apart in the fickle AI news cycle is her belief that the human touch can make AI transformative in business.
Humanized automation
When customers ask Choprasert for help implementing AI, their questions are varied.
“They’ll say things like, ‘Can you automate my entire business?’ or ‘Can you automate my entire department?'” says Choprasert. “I need to burst her bubble and bring her down to earth a little.”
She then explains the strategy of humanized automation to her customers. The concept calls for AI to do 60 to 70 percent of the basic work and humans to do the finishing touches.
“However, it doesn’t seem automated [AI] did a lot of the work,” says Choprasert. “This way you benefit from authenticity but also save a lot of time on the backend.”
For example, when Choprasert receives sponsorship requests for her personal brand Brand Nat or Future AI Lab, she uses AI tools to create customized offers and automated email drafts. Choprasert then adds a personal touch to the emails.
“Suppose you are an experienced marketer. You know that the content that ChatGPT or Claude puts out, whether it works or not, is based on your experience. All you have to do is ask the right questions, see the answers, and then steer them where you want them because you know what you want the end result to be, or at least have an idea,” says Choprasert. “At the end of the day, we still need people when it comes to driving AI forward.”
“At the end of the day, we still need people when it comes to driving AI forward.”
Choprasert links the turning point of generative AI to the invention of the car. Cars have changed the course of society, but you still need a human in the driver’s seat.
Currently.
Choprasert understands the feeling when she makes clients explode. She understands the urgency – if AI had existed when she ran her first company, it would have forced her to change the way she ran it.
Don’t skip: How to use AI to start a business
New beginnings with AI
Choprasert has a thread in ChatGPT called “Business Coach GPT” that she chats with when she has a problem. She says if she were to start her e-commerce business again today, she would use ChatGPT as a co-founder.
“If you tell ChatGPT you want to build $100,000 [ecommerce] Tell your company who your target market would be and what your product is, all the information you have about yourself and then you would ask them, “Ask me 10 questions to create a business plan or strategy for me. “,’” says Choprasert. “And in this way, ChatGPT understands your situation and asks you questions that you can answer.”
But when Choprasert started her tea business in 2015, she couldn’t get up to speed with a ChatGPT prompt. She had to learn it herself. Well, almost alone.
“I listened to Foundr [Podcast] Actually, as a solopreneur, I packed my tea and did everything myself,” says Choprasert.
Although she sold the tea business in 2022, Choprasert remembers how lonely the first few years were. It wasn’t until her husband suggested she market the business on TikTok that Choprasert felt connected to other entrepreneurs.
“I ignored it for a year because I thought TikTok was just for kids and people doing dance routines and stuff like that,” Choprasert says.
She initially posted content about Life of Cha but saw limited engagement.
“But then I came back to the idea of talking about my entrepreneurial insights and my journey and everything I wanted to know before starting a business, what I had to learn the hard way through experience and a lot of lost money,” Choprasert says.
She began gaining momentum on the platform under the TikTok account Brand Nat. She even reached 100,000 views on a video in which she steals a former competitor’s customer list after he went out of business.
“I just enjoyed talking about that aspect of marketing on TikTok and connecting with people who found the content really useful, which kind of made me really happy,” says Choprasert.
She applied her findings to Life of Cha, which increased the company’s profile to the point where she was able to exit the company in fall 2022.
Then, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released publicly. And like millions of early adopters, she began experimenting with generative AI.
When her first video on ChatGPT hit a million views, she knew it would be a great idea to double down on AI learning.
“So many opportunities have come to me because I only published organic, value-driven content,” says Choprasert.
Due to the popularity of her short videos and free newsletter, business owners started seeking her help.
Where you can implement AI in your company
Choprasert uses her experience as a founder to help others use AI to free up more time and get things done more efficiently. She teaches e-commerce founders to implement AI on four pillars:
- automation
- Content creation
- Data analysis
- Coaching
First, she suggests connecting tools like Zapier and ChatGPT to automate your customer service, sales funnel, and customer communications. For example, when Choprasert ran her tea business, she spent eight hours a day communicating with wholesalers. Today, founders can use a chatbot and email software to follow up on leads at any cadence they want, saving valuable time instead of worrying about emails late into the night.
Content creation is the most common use of generative AI. But ecommerce founders can also use the tools to create professional-looking product photos and descriptions that would have cost hours and thousands of dollars when starting their first business.
While ChatGPT is good for research and strategy, Choprasert suggests using Claude as a content assistant for developing scripts, hooks, and ad copy.
“ChatGPT somehow feels very sales-oriented, very promotional. But Claude eliminates this process [and is] less promotional [and] less advertising,” says Choprasert.
Another issue Choprasert struggled with while running her e-commerce business was data analysis. Today, AI assistant tools like Shopify Sidekick can help founders quickly sort through data tables and make recommendations to improve an eCommerce store or social ads.
“It is very valuable to have truly data-driven insights, especially when AI is able to interpret them in a simplified version,” says Choprasert.
“It is very valuable to have truly data-driven insights, especially when AI is able to interpret them in a simplified version.”
Finally, AI can serve as a co-pilot. It’s an implementation that’s crucial to Choprasert’s daily work.
“I go there and say, ‘Here’s my situation, here’s the problem, my dilemma, what should I do?’ And it will give me some guidance on how I should approach the problem,” says Choprasert. “It’s a matter of how much relevant information you give him so he can understand what you’re trying to achieve.”
Choprasert believes that understanding comes from a willingness to try.
Try again
It seems like every week there is a new AI tool to solve a problem. It can be daunting even for someone like Choprasert, who swims in AI every day.
She suggests you try it.
“One of the things I wish I had known sooner or during this business trip [that is] “Nowadays it’s still important to try a lot of things because the more you try, the more you see what works and what doesn’t, and the market will tell you if it’s actually good or not,” says Choprasert.
No wonder, she uses an AI tool to keep trying. Feedly is a platform that aggregates news sites based on a specific search topic, so Choprasert instantly knows which new AI tools to check for her newsletter or next viral video.
Just trying to use AI pays off for their work and their customers. She says the customers trying out AI tools are the ones implementing and making big changes to their business that impact the bottom line.
Take it from someone who would go back and do it differently. Don’t be afraid of AI; Try it.
Keep learning: AI tools that can actually help your eCommerce business
Ecomm AI apps for beginners
- Make your product photos look professional studio quality with Pebblely and Adobe Firefly.
- Write hooks that get clicks with Claude.
- Sort your inbox with SaneBox.
- Create internal guidance and training with Tango.
- Get automatic data insights with Sidekick.
- Scale your customer support by building your own GPT.
- Hire a free business coach from ChatGPT.
