Your AI team: 4 free prompts for small business owners
Four ready-to-use ChatGPT and Claude prompts for the jobs that eat your week — customer replies, social captions, review replies and invoice follow-ups. Copy, paste, fill in the brackets.
An AI team doesn't have to mean hiring a developer. It starts with four prompts you can copy today.
Each one below is written for a specific, repeatable job — not a vague ask. Copy it, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, swap in your own details in the brackets, and read what comes back before you send it. It's a first draft, not a final answer.
The four prompts
One rule before you paste a customer's message in: the OAIC recommends not entering personal information, particularly sensitive information, into publicly available generative AI tools. Take the name and phone number out first. Source: OAIC.
You're replying to a customer message for [business name], a [type of business] in [suburb]. Here's the message: [paste message]. Reply in a friendly, professional tone, keep it under 60 words, answer their question directly, and end with a clear next step (e.g. booking link, phone number, or 'let me know a good time'). No emoji. Match how a real person would text back, not a corporate script.
Write an Instagram caption for this photo: [describe the photo]. Business: [business name], based in [suburb]. Tone: direct, a bit of personality, no corporate speak. Keep it to 3–4 short lines, sentence case, no emoji, no hashtags inside the caption itself. End with one clear call to action (book, call, or visit). List 5 relevant hashtags separately underneath.
Here's a customer review for [business name]: [paste review]. Write a reply that thanks them by name if given, references one specific detail from their review, and stays under 50 words. If the review is negative, acknowledge the issue without getting defensive and offer to sort it out offline (phone or email). No generic 'we value your feedback' filler.
Write a polite follow-up message for an unpaid invoice. Invoice number: [X]. Amount: [$X]. Due date: [date]. Days overdue: [X]. Tone: friendly first reminder if under 7 days overdue, firmer but still polite if over 14 days. Keep it under 80 words. Include the amount, the due date, and one easy way to pay. No threats, no legal language unless specifically asked for.
How to use: paste the prompt into ChatGPT or Claude, fill in the brackets with your own details, and treat what comes back as a first draft — read it before you send it.
Free to reuse. The prompts on this page are licensed under CC BY 4.0: use them, change them and share them, including in your business. The article itself stays © Whale Digital Consulting. If you pass the prompts on, credit them like this: Prompts by Whale Digital Consulting (whaledigitalconsulting.com.au/blog/ai-team-prompts), CC BY 4.0. New to AI? Start here for the five-step reading order.
Questions we get asked
What are the 4 free AI prompts for small business owners?
Four ready-to-use ChatGPT and Claude prompts for the jobs that eat your week: replying to customer messages, writing social captions, replying to reviews, and chasing overdue invoices. Copy each one, paste it in, and fill in the brackets with your own details.
Do I need ChatGPT or Claude to use these prompts?
Either works — paste the prompt into whichever one you already use, swap in your own details, and read what comes back before you send it.
Can I trust what ChatGPT or Claude writes for customer replies?
Treat it as a first draft, not a final answer — read what comes back before you send it, the same way you would with any of the four prompts above.
What if I don't want to type the prompts myself?
These four are worth using by hand today. If the admin side is eating more of your week than you'd like, that's exactly what our AI automation for small business service takes off your plate — tell us what's taking the time and we'll send back a fixed quote.
When a prompt turns into a workflow
If you paste the same prompt every morning, that's a job worth mapping. We sit with it forward-deployed, write down the steps around the prompt, and build the smallest version that runs without the copy-paste.
You run it for a week. A person still approves every reply before it goes out.
Example scenario, not a client result: a florist pastes each new review into prompt 3 every morning. The workflow version collects the new reviews, drafts the replies, and waits for the owner to approve them.
Want this running without you typing a prompt at all?
These four are worth using by hand today. If the marketing side of your business is eating more of your week than you'd like, see what's live in Whale Marketing in One. If it's the admin side, or tell us what's taking the time and we'll send back a clear, fixed quote — get a proposal.
