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4 Ways Other Ways T&T Businesses Can Use AI (That Have Nothing to Do With Social Media)
These days, our new best friends: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI models are churning out those unmistakable AI graphics and captions you can see from a mile away. That is NOT a bad thing, so nothing to feel bad about. It’s actually refreshing to see nicely composed images with well organized information. Some critics (and there is no shortage of Trini critics) argue that there is too much detail stuffed in, but that’s a matter of preference; beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
That’s a real use case, and it saves time, and credit to the hundreds of Trini businesses that have caught on so quickly and doing a good job. But it’s also the shallow end of the pool. If that’s where your AI usage starts and stops, you’re using maybe 5% of what’s actually available to you, and the other 95% is the part that touches your bottom line.
AI Can Do So Much More
AI isn’t just a graphic designer you keep on a free retainer for Facebook and Instagram posts. It has more abilities and applications than that. You have to think of it more like a staff member you haven’t hired yet— the key word being ‘hire’ as on the payroll. It’s highly possible the majority of Trini businesses are using free versions, which again, is nothing to feel bad about, but if you want to have AI be all it could be, you’ll have to make the financial investment, notwithstanding the USD situation, and upgrade to paid plans.
AI can be a staff member who can draft your emails, comb through your numbers, and answer customer questions, all while you doh-doh-ing (that means sleeping Gen Z…).
Here are four places to put that “staff member” to work (or is it wuk?) this week, none of which involve a single social media post. Note these are the simple applications you can implement fairly easy. There are more complex processes, using Claude for example, to configure an AI agent(s) for very involved tasks within your business workflow. But that’s another article.
1. Operations & Admin
Every business owner in T&T is drowning in the same Caroni swamp: WhatsApp threads with customers and suppliers, emails full of back-and-forth that could’ve been one clear message, unstructured business processes (technically called Standard Operating Procedures- SOPs) that only live in someone’s head.
AI is genuinely good at cutting through that noise.
Try this today
Copy a long, messy WhatsApp thread with a supplier or staff member and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude with the prompt: “Summarize this into a clear list of decisions made and action items, with who’s responsible for each.” What used to take you twenty minutes of scrolling and re-reading turns into a ten-second read.
Same goes for building out a process you’ve never written down, which are probably many. If you’ve been training new staff the same way for years, or every month like some Trini businesses with an ever revolving door, but never documented it, describe the process out loud (or as a rough note) and ask AI to turn it into a clean, step-by-step SOP.
You can do this for even current staff whose roles and responsibilities evolved without ever being documented. You’ll have a real training document in minutes instead of never.
2. Customer Service
Most small and medium businesses in T&T handle customer service the same way: whoever’s free answers, in whatever mood they happen to be in that day. Trinis are notorious for unprofessional customer service; they often make feel like you’re bothering them: “Whappen? Wha yuh want? No we eh have none…”
AI won’t replace that human touch, even though with some of the hoggish attitudes we encounter daily (especially from government offices), we might want it to, but it can make it faster and more consistent, especially for the questions you answer fifty times a week. And you answer them fifty times a week without thinking to figure out a better way that you don’t have to get the calls as much. Maybe update your website, or social media, pin a fixed message to see first.
Try this today
Take your five most common customer questions (delivery time, return policy, payment options, whatever they are for your business) and ask AI to draft clear, on-brand responses for each. Save those as templates. The next time someone asks, you’re pasting and lightly personalizing instead of typing from scratch.
It also works in reverse. If a customer message comes in frustrated, disorganized, or in a mix of English and Trini (yes many Trinis message broken like how they talk!) that’s hard to parse quickly, AI can help you read it clearly and draft a calm, professional reply, even when you’re the one who’s frustrated.
3. Finance & Reporting
You don’t necessarily need an accountant or a fancy piece of software for basic insights to your financial performance. The sad truth in T&T today, you don’t even have to look at any paper— the dead store with no customers is loud and clear that ‘ting bad bad’. Regardless, the numbers will tell a story which you can translate and convert into actionable strategy; you can’t mope around and wallow in it, you have to do something.
Try this today
Export your sales data for the last few months into a spreadsheet (most POS systems and even a basic Excel sheet will do), or if you don’t use a POS, you’re probably manually tracking on Excel anyway. Ask AI to identify patterns: which days are slowest, which products are carrying the business, where the revenue dips are happening. You won’t get an audit-grade financial analysis, but you will get a starting point that would’ve otherwise taken you an afternoon squinting at rows of numbers.
It’s also useful for the paperwork you feel it hard to write: a cash flow summary for a bank loan application or to open a new account, a simple budget breakdown for a new project, a first draft of a pricing proposal. AI won’t replace an accountant, but it’ll get you 80% of the way there before you ever need to pay for their time.
And speaking of manually tracking sales on spreadsheets, what can probably be for a next article, but we’ll only mention it here, is that do you know that AI can also take your spreadsheet and convert it into a custom CRM? Yes it can, and we’ve already done it ourselves at Forward Multimedia.
4. The Data You Already Have
This one is for the more technically minded but it’s not that complicated if you are so inclined. If your website is connected to Google Analytics or Google Search Console, you’re virtually sitting on a pile of real information about your customers that’s just… sitting there, unread. You can also connect your Google Business profile as well.
Pre-AI, it was a bunch of raw data that would make anyone giddy and glassy-eyed. Yes, there were some info that could easily be read and understood, but the depth that AI can organize, analyze, and interpret the data within the context of your business and its goals is really amazing.
Try this today
If you don’t have that kind of setup yet, start smaller. Log into Google Search Console and export the list of search terms bringing people to your site. Ask AI to group them by theme and tell you what they suggest about what your customers actually want. You’ll be surprised how often the answer doesn’t match what you assumed.
We do this kind of work for our own clients: connecting a business’s live analytics data to AI and turning raw numbers into a plain-English report that actually says something useful, which pages are bringing in visitors, where people are dropping off, what people are searching to find you in the first place. It can even create an actionable 90-day plan you can implement, not just giving you a nice looking report.
It’s not a hypothetical. It’s something we run for real T&T businesses every month, and it consistently surfaces things owners had no idea were happening on their own website.
Pick One, Not All Four
You don’t need to overhaul your entire business this week. Just bear in mind that AI is growing exponentially, and if you keep scratching around the surface, by the time you get the hang of it, it will be many more miles ahead.
Pick the one area above that’s costing you the most time or money right now, or one that you feel you can try once. If it works, it becomes part of how you run things. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost twenty minutes, not your whole operation, and then try something else. Don’t ‘try a ting’ like a Trini, give it a good go.
Conclusion
The businesses that get real value out of AI aren’t the ones with the fanciest tools. They’re the ones who stopped treating it like a graphic designer and started treating it like staff.
The majority of T&T businesses are primarily using for graphic design and captions, and we would all do well to take our AI usage to the next level, and actually incorporate it into our business workflow, because if we don’t, pretty soon all we’ll see is a dot on the horizon, getting smaller, it it would be AI getting away from us.
