ChatGPT Too Generic for Your Business? The Coffee Queue

2026-10-22

It is 8:40 on a Thursday, and you are standing in the coffee queue at a trade fair hall, holding your phone in one hand and a lanyard in the other.

Your stand is half built. Two boxes of stock are still taped shut behind it. And a supplier has just told you, in a chatty voice message, that your order will "probably" arrive next week instead of today.

You open ChatGPT. You type: Write an email to my supplier about a late delivery.

The answer arrives in two seconds.

Dear Supplier, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to inquire about the status of my recent order...

You read it standing there, and your shoulders drop. It is polite. It is correct. It sounds like nobody you have ever been.

The answer that fits every business and none of them

You try again. Make it firmer. Now it sounds like a legal threat from a stranger. Make it friendlier. Now it sounds like a greeting card.

The person ahead of you orders three flat whites and a tray of pastries. You are still scrolling.

This is the part nobody says out loud. You were told that these tools would give you back hours. You were told that a small business with no back office could finally have one. And yet here you are, rewriting the machine's sentences until they sound like you, which takes about as long as writing them yourself.

So you start to wonder quietly whether you are doing it wrong. Or whether it just isn't for people like you, people with a real shop, real customers and a real supplier who has been late three times this year.

By the time you reach the counter, you have deleted the draft. You will write the email by hand later, tonight, in a bad mood. You pay for your coffee and carry it back to a stand that is still not finished.

What the tool never knew

The fair is slow in the early afternoon, the way fairs always are. A neighbouring stallholder, who sells hand-bound notebooks and has been doing this for years, leans over while you both wait for the lunch crowd.

You mention the supplier email. You mention the bland answer. She laughs, not unkindly.

"What did you tell it?" she asks.

You say what you typed. She nods slowly.

"It knows nothing about you," she says. "It doesn't know what you sell. It doesn't know this is the third delay. It doesn't know you want to keep the supplier, just get your stock. So it gives you what it would give anyone."

You think about that for the rest of the afternoon, between visitors.

It wasn't that the tool was bad. It was that you had asked it a question so general that the only possible answer was general. You had handed it a blank page and said, Be me.

And you had never been taught what to hand it instead.

A different kind of question

That evening, in the hotel room with the air conditioning humming, you try something small.

This time you don't type a request. You type a few facts. What you sell. Who the supplier is to you. How many times this has happened. What you need by when. What you want the tone to feel like, and what you want to keep intact.

The answer is not perfect. But for the first time it sounds like it was written for you. You change two sentences and send it. It takes four minutes.

You lean back on the pillow and notice something odd. The knot that had been sitting under your ribs since the voice message is gone.

Nothing about the tool changed. What changed was that someone, finally, had given it something to work with.

The after: an ordinary Monday

Picture a Monday a few weeks on.

You are at your own desk, coffee still hot. A customer has asked whether a product comes in another colour. A supplier needs a reminder. A product description has been on your list since the spring. A new helper is starting next month, and nothing about how you do things is written down.

A year ago, each of these would have been a small dread, a thing to carry around all day.

Now each one is a short, familiar move. You know what to tell the tool, and so you get something usable back. You spend a few minutes making it yours. You press send and close the tab.

By ten you have done what used to eat your Sunday evening. By lunch you are thinking about the actual work, the part you started the business for.

It isn't magic, and it doesn't make decisions for you. It just means the blank page no longer stares at you, and the answers stop sounding like everybody else's.

If you recognise yourself in the queue

If you have ever stood somewhere inconvenient, reading a polished, empty paragraph and thinking this isn't for my kind of business, it may simply be that nobody showed you what to put into it.

That is the whole idea behind the Small Business Operations AI Prompt Pack: 75 fill-in-the-brackets prompts for product texts, customer replies, supplier emails, job ads, SOPs and weekly plans. You fill in the brackets with your own details, and you get answers that start close to your voice instead of far from it. It comes as a PDF and as Markdown, so you can copy straight from it.

It comes with a 30-day money-back promise: if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

And if you are not ready for that, that is fine. Next time you open the chat window, try giving it three true facts about your situation before you ask for anything. See what comes back.

The coffee queue will still be there. But you might not need to stand in it with a knot in your chest.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.