The 10 Best ChatGPT Commands for Business
Ten prompts that have earned their place in the running of my companies — for briefs, board packs, negotiations, hiring and the dull admin nobody writes about.
I run companies across travel, technology, manufacturing and distribution, and the honest truth about that work is that most of it is not strategy. It is drafting, summarising, comparing, chasing and deciding — often at speed, often with incomplete information. That is precisely where a language model earns its keep.
What follows are the ten commands I genuinely use in business. Not clever tricks. Not a list written by someone who opened the app once. These are the prompts that survived two years of daily use inside real operating businesses, and the reason each one works.
1. "Ask me questions until you have enough to do this properly." — The single most useful sentence I have found. Most poor output comes from a poor brief, and most poor briefs come from the person writing them being too close to the problem. Turning the machine into the interviewer changes the quality of everything downstream. I use it before any plan, pitch, policy or long document.
2. "Summarise this in one paragraph a busy person would actually read." — Not bullet points. Not a corporate executive summary. One paragraph for someone with ninety seconds. I run board packs, contracts, supplier proposals and long email chains through this before deciding whether they deserve my full attention. It has saved more hours than any piece of software I have bought.
3. "Give me the strongest argument against this." — Models are agreeable by design, and agreement is worthless when you are about to sign something. Forcing the opposing case surfaces the objection your investor, your board or your customer was always going to raise — while you still have time to answer it.
4. "Explain this to me as if I have to defend it in a meeting tomorrow." — Quite different from "explain simply". This gives you working knowledge, the likely questions, and an honest map of where your understanding is thin. I have used it before more negotiations than I care to admit, particularly in industries I was new to.
5. "Compare these options in a table with the trade-offs, not just the features." — Features are marketing. Trade-offs are the truth. Whether it is software, suppliers, markets or funding routes, insisting on the cost of each choice rather than its virtues produces a decision rather than a brochure.
6. "Build me a one-page decision memo: options, recommendation, risks, what we do if we are wrong." — This is the format I want from my own teams, so it is the format I ask the machine for. The final clause matters most. A recommendation without a reversal plan is a guess in a good suit.
7. "What am I missing?" — Three words, deployed after you have already produced the plan, the model or the list. It is the closest thing to a second pair of eyes at two in the morning. Perhaps half the time the answer is nothing useful. The other half has saved me real money.
8. "Draft three versions: cautious, direct, and warm." — For anything sensitive: a difficult message to a client, a rejection, an announcement to a team after bad news, a chase on an overdue invoice. Seeing the same message at three temperatures makes it obvious which one you actually mean, and the answer usually sits between two of them.
9. "Stress-test these numbers. Which assumption breaks the whole thing?" — Forecasts fail on one or two load-bearing assumptions, not on arithmetic. Asking which line item carries the model is a faster route to the real risk than another afternoon in a spreadsheet. Then go and test that assumption in the market rather than on screen.
10. "Where might this be wrong, and what should I verify myself?" — The command I would keep if I could keep only one. It will not catch everything, but it flags the confident inventions — the figures, the dates, the regulations, the citations — that should never leave your desk unchecked.
A word of caution. None of these commands will run your business. They will not read a room, hold a relationship together, or tell you whether the person across the table means what they say. They cannot take responsibility, and responsibility is the actual job. What they will do is remove the drafting, the summarising and the comparing that stand between you and the decisions only you can make.
Use them for the admin. Keep the judgement for yourself.
