At our recent WEDN conference in February, we held a hands-on workshop with AI Literacy Consultant Rebecca Akben. We learned how to personalize ChatGPT and develop prompts to produce outputs that can help with day-to-day work in economic development. The Creative EDC team uses AI for research, to summarize information, identify common themes in large data sets, translate technical writing for broad audiences, develop graphics, and many other tasks. We often hear from economic developers that they would like to use AI more but do not know where to start or how to integrate it into more day-to-day tasks. Below are eight prompts that would be helpful to most economic development offices. We use ChatGPT most often, but these strategies will work with Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI tools. We use all of these, and some are better than others at specific tasks.
Continuous Company Monitoring – Weekly intelligence on target or existing firms including news and press releases, job postings, website changes, and public filings. A prompt can be set up as a recurring ChatGPT task such that you receive a weekly email with information on your existing businesses. Crystal set up a similar weekly email task to receive a summary of economic development happenings in the Creative EDC market area.
BRE Meeting Preparation – Develop a one-page company brief before visits. The prompt could be something like “generate a one-page company brief for [Company] in [Location] including: overview, products/services, local operations, employment and wage context, recent news, hiring trends, and likely opportunities for expansion/risks for contraction. Tailor this report for a business retention and expansion visit.” Allies can use this to be briefed on a new client before the first meeting.
Turn BRE Notes & Surveys into Actionable Themes – Use AI to identify patterns across a large set of data and information. You can ask your AI tool to analyze BRE notes and survey results and identify common themes in workforce development needs, infrastructure needs, and regulatory issues. A follow-up could be to analyze many such reports from multiple BRE visits and to convert the themes into strategies for your organization, with suggested partners and timelines.
Use Job Postings to Inform Workforce Programs – AI can search for online job postings during a specific time period and analyze the job postings to recommend workforce programs for in-demand jobs that align with programs at your community college. There will be gaps as not all job postings are public, but it can offer some insights.
Competitiveness – One of our favorite exercises in EDO board retreats is to use AI to analyze competitiveness for an ideal project. You can ask the tool to compare your community to peer/competitor locations for a specific industry sector with an expansion project of “X” jobs across workforce, infrastructure, cost of doing business, taxes, and incentives, etc. A follow up prompt could be to identify strengths, gaps, and 3–5 actions to improve competitiveness based on the outcome. The result can be eye-opening to local leadership.
Scheduling – Use AI to plan systematic outreach to targeted existing businesses. Developing a BRE visit schedule with a lot of geography to cover can be time consuming. AI can help by creating an annual schedule to visit companies. You can specify priority sectors, areas of the community/region, set a specific number of visits each quarter, and ask AI to map the most efficient routes.
Key Insights – Most people only read the highlights, the executive summary, and top paragraph of a report. AI is good at summarizing information. The next time you send out your board packet, use AI to develop “The Top Three Things You Need To Know” or something similar. It can support your “dashboard” and other approaches to synthesize information for boards, investors, and stakeholders.
The Creative EDC staff are not AI experts – we just like figuring out ways to make our work more impactful, efficient, and stay on the leading edge of technology.
Drop us a note and share how you are using AI in your work.