How A Singapore Student Uses ChatGPT To Keep Her Family's Neighbourhood Shop Profitable | Money Mind

This looks like any ordinary neighborhood shop that sells daily essentials and lifestyle products. But behind the counter, a 21-year-old is trying to pay for university and keep the business alive. Every decision affects whether she gets pay. What most customers don't see is the silent assistant helping her make those decisions. Recently, she had to reorganise more than 8,000 products for a new point of sales system.

I download [music] everything, all the 8,000 over products from the old system and then I put it into AI and tell them that the problem now is that I have this 8,000 over products. They don't have a correct product type and I have no idea which product should I put them under. AI [music] worked like a super smart shop assistant, reading the details

and sorting products to the right categories. It then got all this data ready for the new system so that business continues as usual. Doing it manually would take more than 5 days. AI finished the job in two. Spending 1 hour on something that can be automated. But after that 1 hour, maybe I can go and do sales, push more sales. 3 years ago, this shop was on the brink of closing.

[music] En Qi's parents used to run it. Sales were falling. More customers were shopping [music] online. Instead of walking away, and her younger sister took over. She was just 18. The learning curve was expensive. Not enough stock, the shelves stay empty. Order the wrong thing and your money is stuck in stock. Within 3 months, the sisters were in the red

because of the mistakes we made along the way and then things just accumulates. That's why we just incurred like over S$30,000 debt. Giving up wasn't an option. The sisters negotiated with suppliers and slowly paid off every dollar. Today, the shop is debt-free, but every month still comes with bills. This shop is En Qi's paycheck. Since I was 16 years old, I stopped taking pocket money from