My uncle has a business that helps SME’s clarify and define their purpose to help them either strategise or tell their story to customers or investors. He asked me recently to explore if it would be possible to use AI to help founders and these SME owners to clarify their purpose by means of writing a ‘purpose statement’.
I hadn’t encountered Purpose Statements before, but I am familiar with the art of Story Telling for business and so can see where this concept fits it.
In essence, the agency I was approached by already work closely with clients to get to know what makes a business tick and help sum that up succinctly by writing Business Stories. The idea was to explore how far AI could be used to help smaller businesses, or individual entrepreneurs, summarise succinctly the purpose of their business or endeavour.
I thought this was just the kind of task a Large Language Model (LLM) should be good at. If we can give it examples of world class Purpose Statement’s as examples, and then also feed it the answers to a series of questions that the company in question completes, it should be able to generate something.
I chose to implement this as a React Native app for iOS as the agency wanted a proof of concept that anyone could run easily on their own iPhone.
As is my go-to these days, I used the Cursor AI IDE to help me write the required code and in no time (less than a day) I had an MVP working.
The app asks you a total of 16 questions of questions about the Why, What and How of your business. Your answers are passes to ChatGPT4 along with a selection of well regarded human written examples from other companies. The app then presents the LLM generated statement to the user. They can then choose to ask the LLM to have another go, or if they are happy they can share the results using the native iOS share functionality. The resulting Purpose Statement can then be used in conversations for networking, in literature or on a clients website.
For what it’s worth here’s what it produced when I answered the questions from the point of view of an AI first technology agency startup.
Why:
We exist to liberate businesses from inefficiencies and mundane tasks, inspiring them to embrace the transformative power of Al.
How:
By infusing a deep understanding of Al capabilities with lateral thinking, we reimagine business processes, help businesses understand data better and pioneer new, more efficient ways of working.
What:
We’re enabling businesses to free up their resources and deliver maximum value to their customers. With our cutting-edge Al solutions, we’re revolutionizing work, one automation at a time.
an AI generated ‘Purpose Statement’ for an AI first tech agency
I really enjoyed how using AI to both help code the app, and be a core functional component. This meant I could get something working in hours not days, and that the task it performs was, until very recently, considered something only a human could do.