I’ve used LLMs chatbots like ChatGPT for all kinds of things—automation (Make.com, N8N), data cleanup, content generation. But one of the most memorable use cases came from a dead-simple client ask:
“We need a competitive pricing analysis for a new product in an FMCG category. There are a lot of brands.”
Instead of launching into web research (read: web scraping tool) or hunting down old spreadsheets, I went to the store. Stepped six feet back from the shelf. Snapped five photos. Captured 70+ SKUs across 15+ brands—retail price, sale price, product specs, all of it.
Uploaded the images to ChatGPT, prompted it to build a table: brand, product, volume, retail price, sale price, etc. Exported the results to a CSV. Cleaned it up in Sheets. Analyzed the data. Done and delivered.
This was over a year ago, and it broke my brain.
It was the first time I realized the right mix of curiosity and AI can outperform the typical approach.
AI unlocks a lot and you can move from question to clarity—fast. But it’s up to you to think differently, creatively, and use it to your advantage.
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Some other related thoughts I had while writing this post...
The best solutions no longer look like what they used to. Taking photos at a grocery store? I felt awkward, but the experiment paid off and produced the outcome I was after...quickly.
AI is as useful as your willingness to experiment. Don’t get stuck trying to use it “the right way.”
To get the most out of AI, you need judgment, curiosity, and a bias for action.
Fast sometimes beats clever?!?!
