What is an AI business plan?

An AI business plan is a strategic document generated using artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. With the right prompts, you can create a professional, tailored plan in seconds – one that reflects your product, service, brand values, market positioning and overall objectives. While a range of AI tools can help you in this process, ChatGPT helps you craft a customised business plan yourself, provided you use clear, well-structured prompts.

How to effectively use generative AI to create your business plan

Creating an AI-generated business plan may involve inputting customer or business data. For this reason, it’s important to familiarise yourself with best practices first. In the next section, we’ll briefly explain what generative AI is and how to use it safely.

Before that, let’s explore how to get the most out of your AI prompts. When writing a prompt, consider the following principles:

• Be specific
• Experiment and use follow-up prompts to improve responses
• Use ‘chain of thought’ prompting – asking ChatGPT to explain its reasoning step by step
• Provide examples (e.g. a business plan you’d like to emulate)
• Break down complex ideas
• Define your target audience demographics

With these principles in mind, you may be more likely to gain useful results from generative AI, as generative AI tools like ChatGPT refine their results based on your feedback. You can also refine your results further by confirming whether you are happy with the answer it has provided. 

Example of an effective prompt

Instead of simply asking:

– ‘Write a business plan for a tech start-up.’

Try using a layered prompt like:

– ‘Write a business plan outline for a B2B SaaS platform that helps small retailers manage inventory. Include key revenue streams, customer acquisition channels and potential risks.’– ‘Now expand the marketing section using low-budget strategies suitable for an early-stage start-up.’– ‘Explain your reasoning behind each chosen strategy.’

By breaking your prompt into stages and asking ChatGPT to explain its reasoning, you can co-create a more structured, relevant and thought-through plan. This helps you stress-test ideas and may reveal new opportunities you might not have considered.

Use quality data

The quality of the data you input into ChatGPT directly affects the quality of the output you receive. As Indeed AI expert Matt Burney explains in guide to the future of AI in HR, this is known in tech communities as ‘garbage in, garbage out’. The same principle applies when generating business plans with AI – being data literate can help you get better, more relevant results.

By supplying ChatGPT with key marketing, business and customer data points, you increase the likelihood of generating a plan that fits your needs. Just as importantly, make sure the data you provide is clean. As noted in our article on people analytics, clean data is free from errors and should be:

• Accurate
• Reliable
• Complete
• Timely
• Relevant

Using generative AI safely

When using generative AI to create content, it’s important to consider ethical implications. As Indeed’s AI toolkit for talent leaders outlines, AI can replicate bias at scale. For example, if you’re using AI to analyse target audience demographics, consider how bias in the underlying data could affect the AI’s assessment. A thorough data audit may help ensure your datasets are not skewed or biased towards any particular group.

In addition, if you’re using customer or business data, make sure you remain compliant with data protection regulations. Sharing customer, client or employee data without consent may breach GDPR. Research these requirements carefully as well as the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 before using this type of information as input.

Creating an AI business plan: step-by-step

Now that we’ve covered best practices, let’s look at how to use ChatGPT prompts to build your business plan. In this section, we’ll break the plan into key stages, with example prompts you can use at each step. We’ll cover the following stages:

• Idea generation
• Executive summary
• Business description
• Competitor analysis
• Business roadmap and KPIs
• Pricing and marketing strategy

1. Idea generation

Before you begin using ChatGPT to build your business plan, it can be helpful to start with a quick idea generation session. ChatGPT can ‘remember’ information provided earlier in a conversation and build on it later, so this early step can form a useful foundation. Try prompts such as:

• ‘What market trends are popular in [company industry]?’
• ‘What innovative features are [competitor name(s)] investing in?’
• ‘Conduct a quick review of customer feedback on [competitor product]’

Once you’ve gathered your initial ideas, you can move on to the first stage of the business plan – the executive summary.

2. Executive summary

An executive summary is a short document that outlines your business proposal and offers key recommendations. It’s typically used to inform executives or investors and help them decide whether to support your idea. This makes it a critical first component of your business plan. An effective executive summary should highlight:

• How your business meets a specific need that competitors do not
• Who your target audience is
• What your unique solution offers
• Why your business is well positioned to lead the project

To generate an executive summary using ChatGPT, start by feeding it a document that outlines your business concept. This might include the problems or challenges you aim to solve, along with key findings, market analysis or relevant data points. Then use a prompt such as:

‘Create an executive summary from the document above, focusing on recommendations, key findings and how to address pain points.’

Refining executive summary prompts

ChatGPT will produce a summary based on the details you provide. You can refine it further by trying prompts such as:

• Use persuasive language
• Aim this at an investor audience
• Make this more concise

You can also ask ChatGPT to create a customisable template if you’d prefer to complete the details yourself. In that case, try a prompt such as:

‘Create an executive summary template with the following sections: A) x B) x C) x.’

3. Business description 

A business description gives a brief overview of your company’s vision, mission, values, unique selling points and long-term goals. It could be just one or two paragraphs in length, or longer if needed, but keeping it succinct is often more effective.

To create a business description that’s right for your company, you may need to feed ChatGPT relevant information such as your mission statement, vision or value proposition. If you don’t have this in a single document, you can include it directly within your prompt.

Use prompts like the following to create your business description, filling in information where required:

‘Create a persuasive business description for my company based in the [x] sector. Our company’s mission is to [x], our purpose is to [x], our core values are [x], and our USP is [x].’

If you plan to use any relevant documentation to create a business description, you could use a prompt like:

‘Create a business description outlining mission, purpose, core values and USP based on the document provided.’

4. Competitor analysis

ChatGPT can also help you conduct a competitor analysis by identifying key players in your market and suggesting ways to position your business against competitors. It can suggest how to position your business more effectively based on your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and customer sentiment. Here are some prompts you can use to identify competitors and analyse their marketing strategies, customer insights from reviews, and strengths and weaknesses of companies in your industry:

• ‘Identify top [x] competitors within the [x] industry.‘
• ‘Identify [x] key customer insights based on [company name’s] customer reviews, social media posts and website testimonials.‘
• ‘Identify customer sentiment based on [company name’s] customer reviews, social media posts and website testimonials.’

You can also ask ChatGPT to perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. To improve the quality of the output, include relevant context such as:

• The purpose of the SWOT analysis 
• Your business goals and key competitors
• What competitor strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you want ChatGPT to identify
• Key metrics you would like AI to analyse, such as revenue growth, employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction

Here is an example prompt you could use:

‘Conduct a SWOT analysis of [competitor] based on customer reviews, social media presence, testimonials, website, marketing strategy, employee reviews and key metrics such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, brand awareness and employee satisfaction.’

5. Business roadmap and KPIs

Once you’ve defined your core business elements, you can use ChatGPT to create a business roadmap. This outlines the key stages or activities required, depending on your goals, for example, product development, lead generation or market expansion.

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to provide measurable targets in keeping with your business roadmap. To make your business roadmap prompt more focused, you may include specific KPIs. To refine the prompt, consider feeding it additional information, such as documentation and specifics:

‘Create a step-by-step business roadmap based on the business plan document attached, covering [timeframe] and focusing on key metrics like lead generation, customer acquisition, customer retention, traffic generation and revenue.’

You might also gain deeper insights into how to reach KPI targets with prompts like:

‘Create a roadmap showing how to increase customer acquisition within [x time period].’

You can ask ChatGPT to provide a month-by-month roadmap, covering research foundations, funnel organisation and creation, channel testing and content launch, partnerships and community growth opportunities, and optimisation and automation.

6. Pricing and marketing strategy

Finally, you can use ChatGPT to develop your pricing and marketing strategies. Prompts can help you define your audience personas, identify relevant channels and tailor your approach based on platform-specific behaviours.

Start by creating a buyer persona with a prompt like:

‘Create a buyer persona based on a business based in the [x] industry, based in [location].‘

ChatGPT might then provide you with a response that identifies that buyer persona’s goals and motivations, pain points, behaviours and habits, favourite brands and how they might discover your business. 

To develop a channel strategy, try a prompt like:

‘Create a social media channel strategy for a company in the [x] industry based in [location], with [x] followers on Instagram and [x] on TikTok between the ages of [x].‘

Based on this prompt, ChatGPT could generate a strategy that includes platform-specific goals, recommended content types, suggested tactics, posting frequency and KPIs to track.

With the right ChatGPT prompts, you may build an AI-generated business plan from scratch quickly and effectively. As you do so, bear in mind GDPR and data protection regulations, and refer back to the best practices outlined above. By adapting these example prompts to suit your specific needs, you can create a personalised, highly targeted business plan aligned to your goals.