I’ve been doing a lot of work around AI and Chat GPT integration. I thought I would write a blog post – my thoughts on using AI as a digital VA (virtual assistant).
As I’ve worked more and more with Chat GPT I see it’s potential to make a number of jobs redundant, but I would encourage you to think of AI as a digital assistant or VA that will help you do your work more efficiently not as a threat.
Here are a couple of my projects I’ve been creating using AI:
- Woo Ace – AI WooCommerce Developer
- WP AI Customer support – an AI customer service agent
- Under development project X – a service to create a list of domain names for your and find available domain names and social media accounts
Mindset – Think of AI as a Virtual Assistant to help you to do your job.
I know it’s easy to say this as a freelancer running their own business and it’s not as easy to do this if you are employed in a company, but think of yourself as a manager of AIs rather than an employee, you can create a virtual AI team around you using AI that will do certain tasks for you.
For example, If you run a website as part of your job, you can create content using AI, have Dal-e create images or photos for your site, have AI code up development solutions. You can delegate this work to AI and have your virtual assistants do the work for you.
Does the boss need to know you are using AI, I don’t think so, that can be your little secret.
Woo Ace As An Example Of A VA
I’ve been very inconsistent with my domain WooAce.com, it has been used for a number of projects such as WooCommerce maintenance plans, VAs to provide customer support to WooCommerce store owners, none of these projects have really taken off so I’ve decided to use it to house my WooCommerce AI developer.
What does Woo Ace do? It allows you to enter a plain language request and it spits out code on the other side. So, for example I can say “change the add to cart label to buy now” and it will output the code I need to add to my site to make that change. I’ve recently upgraded this to use the API for Chat GPT v4 and the results are very, very good.
I used Woo Ace on a client project the other day to create a code snippet to output a label below the add to cart button saying “shipping is calculated at checkout”. Normally I would have looked up the hook to add code under the checkout button then manually coded the results.
It took me less than a minute to type in the statement to Woo Ace and get functioning code. I made a little tweak to the code to match the exact client requirement and installed the code snippet on their site.
To me that’s an amazing use of my time. Sure I’ve spent several days coding the site up to get to the point it’s at, but I can use this VA going forward to create code snippets for me (that I can charge for) at a fraction of the time it takes me to code them manually. I can honestly say it can create WooCommerce / WordPress code as well as I can.
I bill by the project not hourly so my clients are paying for outcomes not my time, so if I can code those solutions faster all the better.
Charge For Access To Your VA
So I’ve created my Woo Ace VA, now I can charge people to access the coding and prompt creation I have made. I can do this in a couple of ways
- In my normal day to day development activities I can create code snippets and charge for those results.
- I’m creating a membership at Woo Ace so other people can login and create their own code snippets. With a paid account get access to me for support but I see 80%-90% of the heavy lifting being done my my AI code.
I’ve created the robot to do the work, now I’ll grant access to that robot for a reasonable fee that costs less than my hourly rate.
If you are an employee, you are getting your salary or hourly pay in return for output that you should look to outsource to your own AI VAs. This will make you more efficient or free up your time..
Reducing The Time I Need To Work
I see Woo Ace reducing the time I need to work in a week if it takes off (I’m busy re-reading the four hour work week).
If I can get the AI to do a lot of my coding for me, and have customers login and request the code they need themself and implement it, that’s a large part of my job being done for me.
I’ll stand behind the scenes ready to step in when human intervention is needed.
AI Needs Human Ingenuity (For The Moment)
AI is not smart enough to create anything unique yet, it has grabbed it’s knowledge from the internet so it’s regurgitating things humans have done and submitted to the net.
You need to prompt your AI to output things for you, this is where we still need human ingenuity, where we still need our skills. My kids will be learning to be prompters not coders in the future.
AI is a tool that needs human guidance (for the moment), I
Wrap Up – My Thoughts On Using AI As A Digital VA
I’m embracing AI rather than being fearful of it. I can see how powerful it is and how it can be used.
It can’t do the work of creating anything unique yet, it can only create a replica of something we have done in the past and it needs humans to direct it. You should be positioning yourself as someone who knows how to guide the AIs.
What are you thoughts? Are you embracing this new revolution.
If you are looking for help to code up an AI solutions get in touch.
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash doing the seo dance My Thoughts On Using AI As A Digital VA