If you run a shop or a small business

The highest leverage in this course

A shopkeeper, a plumber with a van, a two-person consultancy, a restaurant, a market trader with an online listing. One person is the marketing department, the finance department, the customer service team and the legal function.

That is why the leverage here is the highest of any group in this course. It is also why the failure modes matter: there is nobody else to catch them.

Where it genuinely helps

• Product listings and descriptions written from your own specifications.
• Replies to reviews and enquiries, drafted from your own facts.
• Supplier correspondence in a language you do not speak. Genuinely transformative if you import.
• A first draft of the boring documents — terms, a returns policy, a job advert, a supplier agreement — which then has to be checked by somebody who knows the law where you trade.
• Turning a photograph of a handwritten stock list into a spreadsheet, checked against the original.
• Comparing three supplier quotations you extracted exactly from their PDFs.
• Social posts and captions, from a real thing that happened in your business.

Spend almost nothing

You do not need five subscriptions. For most small businesses the sensible position is:

• The free tiers, which are genuinely capable for the tasks above.
• One paid seat if you use it daily, typically around twenty units of your currency a month, which buys the better model for the handful of hard jobs.
• A local model through Ollama for anything containing customer details.
• The free creative stack — Photopea or GIMP for images, Inkscape for anything vector, Audacity for audio, Shotcut or DaVinci Resolve for video.

Anyone selling you a bundle of AI subscriptions for a small business is selling you convenience you can assemble yourself in an evening.

The specifics that must not be generated

Product facts. Dimensions, materials, compatibility, allergens, voltage, weight limits, care instructions. A wrong dimension is a return; a wrong allergen statement is a serious matter in most food regimes; a wrong safety claim is a regulatory one. These come from your supplier's documentation, and the model formats them.

Claims. Advertising regulators require claims to be substantiated by the advertiser — the ASA in the UK, the FTC in the US, ASCI in India, and equivalents almost everywhere. "The tool wrote it" is not a defence anywhere. If you cannot produce the evidence for "the most durable in its class", do not publish it, however good the sentence is.

Reviews. Never generate a review, never generate a testimonial, and never ask for reviews to be written as if by customers. Beyond the obvious dishonesty, fake reviews have been made specifically unlawful in a number of jurisdictions in recent years, including under UK consumer protection legislation and a US Federal Trade Commission rule. This is one of the few places in this course where the answer is not "be careful" but "do not".

Replying to a complaint

The default register is over-apologetic, and in a complaint that matters, an apology drafted by a model can concede more than you meant. The difficult-message lesson covers the structure; the small business version is shorter:

State what happened, state what you are doing, state by when. Do not accept fault you have not established. Do not offer a remedy larger than you intended because the sentence flowed that way. And read it once more before it is published under your business name, because a shop's reply to a review is read by everybody who reads the review.

The chatbot on your website

If you put one on your site, it speaks for your business. Whatever it promises about prices, availability, delivery or refunds is what a customer will reasonably believe they were told.

Three requirements before it goes live: bind it to a written FAQ you approved rather than letting it answer from general knowledge, log every conversation so you can see what it said, and give a visible route to a human. If you cannot do all three, a good FAQ page and a phone number serve your customers better.

Customer data

A customer list is personal data and you are the controller of it, whether or not you have ever thought of yourself that way. Pasting it into a consumer service is a transfer to a third party, and the size of your business does not change the analysis — it changes only how likely anybody is to ask.

For anything with names, addresses, order histories or payment references, use the local model. It is free, it runs on the laptop behind the counter, and it removes the question entirely.